Programmer dupes employer with deepfake into hiring his inexperienced friend for a salary of $4,000

A user of the social network X under the nickname facelessboy00 shared how he helped a friend pass an interview at a technology company using deepfake technology. He himself is an experienced developer, so he attended the call himself and demonstrated skills, but in real time replaced his face with his friend's. On the second attempt, he managed to get an offer for $4,000 in currency.

The developer explained that his friend had completed frontend courses, but due to a lack of presentation skills, he had been unable to find a job for three months. "I realized that my buddy needed help, otherwise he would return to the factory," notes the thread's author.

At the first stage, they put together a compelling resume for his friend, which would help him pass the initial screening. For this, profiles of people from the domain area working in large companies were selected on LinkedIn. They were looking for a job for his friend in fintech. They took points from the selected profiles that would look good. Then they transferred them to the final resume, and added a few lesser-known companies as experience. For each of them, they inflated the experience to a minimum of 2.5 years.

After that, they began preparing for the interview. For this, they used the DeepFaceLive program, which captures video and returns it with the face already replaced. The delay is 500 ms. Before using the neural network, it needs to be trained on photos of the person whose face will be replaced in the video. They used a dataset of 10,000 photos of his friend as the data source. It is noted that you can record an interview and make a cut of frames with a close-up of the face. The model was trained for 14 hours, and the RTX 3070 video card had to be upgraded to the 4090 series.

At the next stage, the resume was published online and they received the first invitation to an interview. For it, they set up OBS with a 500 ms audio delay so that sound and video with face replacement would play simultaneously. The first interview failed because the developer was suspected of dishonestly passing the interview. The author of the idea himself recounts that at some point he felt so confident that he forgot about the face substitution. He turned to look out the window, and the mask slipped slightly.

That wasn't the end of their attempts. The model was trained again, but this time the process was launched for a week to improve quality. The second interview was successfully passed and an offer of $4,000 per month in currency was received.

The developer handed over passwords for email and messenger to his friend. Now he is preparing for onboarding, and the project author promises to later share the results.