ok so Jake calls me 11 PM on a tuesday. i am scraping burnt garlic off a nonstick pan with a fork (my mom would literally disown me for doing that to her cookware but the garlic was welded on, whatever). Jake recruits for a fintech in Charlotte, around 400 people. november his team hires a software engineer. four Zoom rounds. crushed all of them. offer inside a week. face on camera was not his face. i need you to understand what i mean. not like oh the angle was weird. LITERALLY NOT HIS FACE. deepfake overlay. live. some guy in Ohio who never applied for the job was sitting behind a generated face and talking and doing that little head tilt people do when they think through something hard and all of it was fake. three weeks on the company VPN pulling data. three weeks lol. work output finally came back garbage and somebody went hey wait. Jake goes "how am i supposed to hire anybody now." i am holding a fork at midnight in my kitchen going dude i have no idea.
you know KnowBe4? their entire product is teaching companies how to catch cyberattacks. July 2024, hired an engineer. background check passed, references passed, four video interviews passed. North Korean operative. stolen credentials. AI headshot. their own endpoint detection (their own!!) flagged malware on the laptop hours after it shipped. a cybersecurity awareness company got beat by the exact attack they teach people to spot. i told Jake. he goes "ok weirdly that makes me feel a tiny bit less embarrassed about our situation." yeah. yeah it would lol.
staying up reading about this was a bad call. 179 deepfake cases reported Q1 2025. one quarter. beat the whole previous year. the 700% growth figure, i pulled five or six different sources expecting at least one to disagree and none did. US dollar losses tripled from 360 million to 1.1 billion, January through September hit 3 billion. i was flipping tabs at 1 AM waiting for a number to be wrong. nothing was wrong lol. Fortune August 2025, infiltration rates up 220% in twelve months. sent Jake the link. no message. four word reply from him that i am not going to print.
DOJ rabbit hole around 2 AM. three hundred american companies. North Korean operatives. none of them knew. June 2025 DOJ raided 29 laptop farms in 16 states. two indictments. one arrest. 29 bank accounts frozen. 88 million dollars funneled to Pyongyang over six years. stolen US identities paired with AI faces. i texted Jake just "300" at 2 AM. he replied stop reading. did i stop reading? no i did not.
Palo Alto Networks had a researcher build a fake interview persona in seventy minutes. no image editing experience. old laptop. free tools only. seventy minutes. a mid-2025 survey says 17% of HR people caught deepfake tech during interviews. could that number be low? probably. 83% did not catch anything. nobody in that field wants to think about the 83.
here is where it gets personal. i am interviewing for jobs right now and two things crashed at once. companies panicked, stacked camera mandates and proctoring and extra ID checks, grinding down every real person who just wants to talk about their work. and then the candidate pool i am sitting in has fabricated humans who sailed four rounds and got offers. Google brought in-person pilots back October 2025. yeah. of course.
Jake changed things at his company. cameras on, no backgrounds, no filters allowed. candidates turn their head side to side on calls because the overlay breaks on profile angles apparently. everything recorded for review. ID verification before onboarding instead of one background screen. adds ten minutes. his team sat on a deepfake for three weeks so nobody argued about ten minutes. not one person.
if you are interviewing like me right now be painfully real. camera on, show your disaster of a room, hold up ID, turn your head when they ask. they might fly you in for a final round on a remote gig and i am not going to be upset about that after reading a month of this stuff.
i use InterviewMan for my prep. screen overlay, picks up questions through audio, helps me think while i am right there on camera with my own face and voice. 57,000 users, twenty plus stealth features, twelve bucks a month annual. prep versus crime. helping a real person show what they know versus generating a fake face to impersonate a guy who never applied. one costs twelve dollars. the other is a federal crime the DOJ is actively chasing. fraud up 700%, not running out of cases soon lol.
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