Estimate the cost of a fake remote hire
Model exposure from deepfake interviews, synthetic candidates, stolen identities, laptop farm schemes, and fraudulent employees who gain access before they are detected.
Remote hiring has become a target for synthetic candidates, fraudulent contractors, and fake IT workers using stolen identities, AI-generated profiles, and video manipulation.Use this calculator to estimate the cost of a fraudulent hire reaching payroll, systems, source code, customer data, or financial workflows.
Hiring activity
Typical external hires onboarded in a normal month.
Select all that apply.
Interview process
Audio lag, unnatural facial movement, evasiveness on identity questions, inconsistent location details, repeated resume patterns, reused contact details, or unusual equipment shipment requests.
Onboarding and access
Access amplifiers — what new hires can reach in their first 30 days.
Identity and onboarding controls.
Payroll and tenure
Prior signals
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Modeled range: $130K – $518K
- Annual hires
- 10.5
- Expected fraudulent hires / yr
- 0.91
- Cost per fraudulent hire
- $286K
- Access risk surcharge
- $195K
- Fully remote interview process
Illustrative estimates based on public reporting, government data, and modeling assumptions. Not financial, legal, or security advice.
Detailed risk report
Request a Diopter risk test above and a team member will follow up with a more detailed risk report tailored to your organization, as well as work to schedule an authorized voice and video impersonation simulation against your hiring process.
How we model deepfake hiring fraud exposure.
We start from your annual hiring volume (external hires per month × 12) and apply a role-weighted base risk rate informed by FBI, DOJ, and FinCEN public reporting on fake remote IT workers and synthetic identity fraud. That rate is then adjusted for your remote share, identity verification rigor, interview format, prior identity signals, and unusual candidate arrangements.
Cost per fraudulent hire combines payroll during tenure (until detection), recruiting and onboarding cost, investigation and remediation cost, and an access risk surcharge tied to what a new hire can reach in their first 30 days — source code, customer data, production and admin systems, and finance or payroll workflows. A control-gap multiplier amplifies exposure when device, network, identity, background check, and hiring manager training controls are inconsistent.
Results are returned as a conservative, expected, and high range — not a single number — because real exposure depends on attacker targeting, candidate behavior, control consistency, and how quickly the organization detects and removes a fraudulent hire.
This calculator produces illustrative estimates based on public reporting, government data, security industry research, and modeling assumptions. It is for educational planning only and does not constitute financial, legal, insurance, or security advice.
Public reporting we built on.
Deepfake hiring fraud, answered.
Deepfake hiring fraud occurs when a candidate uses AI-generated media, stolen identity details, manipulated video, or false employment signals to pass interviews and enter an organization under false pretenses.
No. Public enforcement actions have heavily featured remote IT and software roles, but the underlying risk applies anywhere a fraudulent worker can access systems, data, payroll, customers, finance workflows, or sensitive internal information.
U.S. government actions have documented remote IT worker schemes involving stolen identities, false locations, laptop farms, payroll diversion, data theft, and access to U.S. companies. This is one of the clearest public examples of hiring identity fraud at scale.
Traditional background checks may miss synthetic or stolen identities if the process does not include live identity verification, document checks, location consistency, device checks, and repeated validation across interview and onboarding.
No. Diopter is a real-time risk signal layer for live audio and video interactions. Human teams remain responsible for hiring decisions, legal compliance, candidate experience, and authorization.
See the AI Wire Fraud Calculator or browse all Diopter risk calculators.
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