Proxy interviews: how they work, the signs and what to do

A proxy interview is an interview in which the person answering is not the person who will do the job. In a Gartner survey of 3,000 job candidates, 6% said they had taken part in interview fraud, either by posing as someone else or by having someone else pose as them. This article explains the two forms a proxy interview takes, the signs the FBI has published and the checks that connect the interview to the hire.

What counts as a proxy interview

The swap can run in either direction.

In the first form, a stand-in interviews and the named candidate starts the job. The stand-in may appear on camera under the candidate's name, or one person may appear on camera while another supplies the voice. The FBI described the second version in 2022: complaints of voice spoofing in online interviews, in which the lip movement of the person on camera did not match the audio of the person speaking.

In the second form, the candidate interviews and someone else does the work. A US court case shows it in detail. In December 2025 a Maryland man was sentenced to 15 months in prison after he obtained jobs at no fewer than 13 US companies between 2021 and 2024. The companies paid him more than $970,000 for software development that others performed from overseas.

How a proxy interview is arranged

The Maryland case sets out the steps, according to the Justice Department.

1. On January 30, 2023 a man living in Shenyang, China submitted a résumé in the Maryland man's name to a Virginia technology company. It claimed a bachelor's degree and 16 years of software development experience, neither of which the Maryland man had.
2. On March 28, 2023 the Maryland man took an online interview with the company's CEO. He showed his Maryland driver's license and US passport to verify his identity and citizenship.
3. The company hired him and gave him a laptop. He installed remote access software on it, so that the man in China could use it and hide his location.
4. From March to July 2023 the man in China did the work with the Maryland man's credentials. The company paid more than $28,000 in wages, and part of that money was sent overseas.

The identity check in step 2 was real and it passed. The documents belonged to the person holding them. The company could not tell from the interview that a different person would log in on the first day.

The first form needs the opposite gap. A stand-in succeeds when the hiring process accepts a face or a voice in the interview without connecting it to a document, and nobody from the interview sees the new hire again.

The signs of a proxy interview

An FBI notice from October 2023 lists warning signs seen in remote hiring fraud. Several apply to proxy interviews:

• The candidate is unwilling or unable to appear on camera or to hold a video interview.
• The candidate's time, location or appearance on camera is inconsistent from one meeting to the next.
• The candidate shows undue concern about meeting in person.
• Online profiles do not match the résumé, or one identity has several profiles with different pictures.
• The answers show signs of cheating, which the notice describes as excessive pausing, stalling, eye movements that suggest reading, and incorrect answers that sound plausible.

The 2022 FBI warning adds sound and picture that do not agree: lip movement out of step with the voice, and coughs or sneezes that do not line up with the video.

After the hire, the sign is a gap between the interview and the work. Ask the new starter about something specific they said in the interview. A person who was there can pick the thread up. The same test is behind the follow-up questions in how to stop AI during an interview with the questions you ask.

No one sign proves a proxy. A poor connection or a new webcam changes how a person looks and sounds.

What to do about proxy interviews

Connect the person to a document on camera. The 2023 notice recommends that candidates hold a driver's license, passport or other identity document up to the camera during video verification. Do it in the round where the hiring manager is present, so that the person who will supervise the hire has seen the face and the document together.

Keep one interviewer through every round, and have that interviewer join the first-day call. This closes the gap that the first form depends on.

Keep a record. The same notice says to keep records of all interactions with potential employees, including recordings of video interviews. Tell candidates in advance that you record.

Check after the hire as well. The Maryland man passed the identity check at the interview, and the fraud lay in who logged in afterward. The FBI's January 2025 notice recommends identity verification throughout the employment of any remote worker. It also describes what to look for on the network: remote desktop software that should not be there, and many logins to one account in a short time from IP addresses in different countries.

Say what you do. Gartner's advice to employers includes telling candidates about fraud checks and the legal consequences of fraud, and using in-person interviews as one of the assessments. The FBI's 2025 notice likewise recommends completing as much of hiring and onboarding as possible in person. The costs of that are weighed in should you go back to in-person interviews?

The full sequence of checks is in how to verify a remote candidate's identity.

Start with the call itself

Each of these checks happens on a video call where you can see the candidate and the document. SecureInterview is a video interview in the browser, and the candidate joins from a link with no account and no download. On Pro the host can record a meeting to their own device, and everyone in the meeting sees "Recording" while it runs. Start an interview or see how it works.