Hiring fraud cost calculator
What candidate fraud costs you in a year
Two numbers, two costs: the interview time your team burns on candidates who were never real, and the sanctions penalty you owe if a fraudulent remote hire turns out to be a sanctioned worker. Diopter catches the impostor on the live interview, before the offer.
For a fuller model, use the detailed deepfake hiring fraud calculator.
Your hiring pipeline
All external applications your team receives in a year. Drives wasted interview time.
Remote roles you actually hire in a year. Drives the OFAC sanctions exposure.
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$20K wasted interview time + $187K expected OFAC exposure. Modeled range $20K – $1.3M (operational floor to a full enforcement year).
Illustrative estimates based on public reporting, government data, and modeling assumptions. Not financial, legal, or security advice.
About 6.6 of your 110 remote hires a year turn out fraudulent, and any that are sanctioned workers trigger OFAC strict liability: you owe it even without knowing. Each pay period they are paid is a separate violation, up to the $377,700 statutory maximum each, with no cap on the total. About 10 pay periods (~5 months) on payroll is up to $3.8M for a single hire.
The expected figure weights the maximum exposure by the ~5% chance a fraudulent hire is sanctioned and the ~15% chance enforcement lands. Actual penalties follow OFAC's enforcement guidelines (they scale with the payments involved and whether the conduct is egregious), so a real case can land anywhere from far less to the maximum. There is no cap on the aggregate.
About 30% of your 20,000 applications are fraudulent, and 5% of those reach a live interview: 300 fake interviews a year at about $66 of recruiter and hiring-manager time each.
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Two costs, two inputs.
Applications per year drive the first, everyday cost. A share are fraudulent, a share of those reach a live interview, and each one burns recruiter and hiring-manager hours on a candidate who was never real.
Remote hires per year drive the second, more serious cost. A small share of remote hires turn out fraudulent, and a share of those are sanctioned workers. Hiring one is a strict-liability OFAC violation: penalties accrue for each pay period on payroll until detection, which we model at about ten bi-weekly pay periods, roughly five months. We probability-weight that exposure by the odds of an actual enforcement action, so the annual figure is an expected value and the gross exposure is higher.
The headline is the sum of the two. The range runs from the guaranteed operational floor at the low end to a full enforcement year at the high end. Diopter's role is detection, not watchlist screening: we flag the synthetic or impostor candidate live, before the offer, which is what prevents the hire that creates the exposure.
This calculator produces illustrative estimates based on public reporting, government data, and modeling assumptions. It is for educational planning only and does not constitute financial, legal, insurance, or security advice.
Public reporting we built on.
Hiring fraud cost, answered.
U.S. sanctions law is strict liability. A company can be penalized for employing a sanctioned individual, such as a North Korean IT worker using a stolen identity, even without knowing. Penalties accrue per violation for each pay period the worker is on payroll. Catching the impostor on the live interview is what prevents the hire that creates the exposure.
We model about ten bi-weekly pay periods, roughly five months, on payroll before a fraudulent worker is caught. Each pay period a sanctioned worker is paid is a separate violation, so the cost of a single hire is the number of pay periods times the per-violation penalty.
They drive different costs. Applications drive the everyday drain of interviewing fraudulent applicants who were never real. Remote hires drive the serious exposure: the small share who actually get onto payroll and the sanctions liability if any of them is a sanctioned worker.
Public FBI, DOJ, and FinCEN reporting on remote IT worker fraud, industry reporting on fraud rates for remote roles, and OFAC civil penalty guidelines. The figures are illustrative planning estimates, not a quote or a guarantee.
No. Diopter is a real-time risk signal layer for live audio and video interviews. Your team remains responsible for hiring decisions, legal compliance, candidate experience, and authorization.
Assess your defenses in depth with the Deepfake Hiring Fraud Calculator, or browse all Diopter risk calculators.
Research behind hiring fraud costs
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