**Czech companies are still in need of developers**, so they don't ask so many questions when hiring and are happy when they manage to get someone who looks like a capable and experienced "IT guy".

This is something some people try to exploit, greatly helped by **modern artificial intelligence** (AI) tools like Midjourney and Dall-E. However, there are also many other tools, such as [Verif Tools](https://verif.tools/en/), subtitled Fake Document Generator.

**For about nine dollars you can easily order a fake photo of a Czech document**. For example, the citizen may be lying on a table.

## A chauffeur for all the money

Cases of document forgery and subsequent infiltration into Czech companies are cited by Petr Moroz, founder and head of [SCAUT](scaut.com), a company that develops **online tool for the so-called background check to screen candidates for jobs**.

"We have a lot of cases like: We have a sales manager come on board and while he was still on probation, he disappeared with a credit card, a car, a computer, and we never saw him again," Moroz says.

One of his earliest and exemplary "cases" was one that didn't actually happen for him. The company made inquiries with SCAUT to **check out the chauffeur who was supposed to drive the CEO's cars**. Such a screening would have cost the unnamed chain about two and a half thousand crowns, which the chain's security officer refused after consideration.

"The chauffeur was also supposed to drive the children of the CEO in question and have the keys to his house, so we proposed a comprehensive screening, including foreclosures or insolvencies. After a couple of months, we met with the worker again and he told me that **the chauffeur was worth CZK 8.5 million on two stolen seven-seater Bavarians**," Moroz says, adding that after a retrospective check, the driver was found to have eighteen foreclosures.

Moroz cites a case from a betting company as another example of **companies failing to adequately vet their potential employees**. In both cases, the employees were never seen in person, and recruitment was done online.

"During our work with them, we also discovered a person who had created **several fake profiles on the social networking site LinkedIn** under which he was trying to respond to various job advertisements. He was confirming references to himself and actually managed to get into two companies. **He was an Asian with a European passport**, and in one company he was the head of development, and in the other he was a full-stack developer," Moroz says.

**When the companies found out he had a fake identity, he stopped communicating with them and disappeared without another digital trace**. He also withdrew his LinkedIn profiles. "But he could have had countless other such profiles, and since he has not been traced yet, he may continue his activities even now," Moroz says.

Moroz says the big problem also lies not just in direct recruitment but in **referral through employment agencies**. "This is because these candidates do not go to the end company through HR, but rather through the purchase of services," Moroz adds.

Other Czech companies have similar experiences. "We even found out that someone had a **false education document that he forged himself**, and we found out that one candidate had a dubious history in IT contracts," says Jan Klouda, vice president of Vodafone and a member of the Critical Infrastructure Association.

That's why the company **is** conducting more thorough background checks on job candidates.** "Within the Critical Infrastructure Association, this is a topic that everyone is addressing and taking seriously," Klouda adds.


## Recruiters often do not verify information

Police crime statistics also show an increasing trend in **falsifying public documents**. They show that in the past five months of this year, the number of cases has already reached similar numbers to last year or the year before**.

According to the [ACFE](https://legacy.acfe.com/report-to-the-nations/2022/?_ga=2.250365312.702999107.1687871069-987980599.1687871069), such fraud costs companies an average of five per cent of their sales each year, which in the case of ŠKODA Auto, for example, is over one billion euros.


However, as Josef Urban, spokesperson for the Directorate of Foreign Police Services, states, these are cases where an irregular document has been detected physically and therefore are not virtual documents.

"In the case of the verification of virtual documents, this can be verified for Czech documents by checking the relevant registers, while for foreign documents, the verification is carried out through international cooperation," Urban informs.

**The problem, according to security experts, is primarily the fact that recruiters often "ignore "** the background checks and rely on the fact that such a case might not happen to them. This is also proven by the **latest survey among recruiters of IT companies**, which was conducted by SCAUT and its partners among sixty respondents and is available to iDNES.cz.

According to the survey, the second most common source for recruiters to find employees is reaching out to candidates directly via LinkedIn or other social networks**. "We encounter opinions that up to a third of profiles on social networks are artificially created," says Vlastimil Pospíšil from SCAUT.

**More than a third of recruiters in the survey also state that they do not verify the information provided by the candidate during the recruitment process** and at the same time consider the set control mechanisms to be sufficient. "The most common answer to the question why they do not verify the information is the argument that they trust their intuition and impression from the interview," explains Pospíšil.

Security experts recently saw the findings of the survey in action when they **gave more than 100 event attendees their fake IDs** generated for $10 to HR professionals to review. "Only two pros revealed that they were fakes," according to security firm representatives.

## You can verify it, companies just don't do it

And it is this factor that fraudsters often count on, as Samuel Kohoutek of Inboox, a Brno-based detective agency that focuses on vetting potential employees, confirms.

"From our experience, we can say that job applicants **submit forged documents especially where they do not expect a more thorough check**, i.e. where such a check seems unnecessary or where it would be appropriate but the employer does not perform any or insufficient pre-employment background check," says Kohoutek.

**Personalists are not without weapons**, while artificial intelligence helps in creating credible fakes, according to Kohoutek, but **nowadays all key information can be independently verified** or traced. He cites the example of a fake ID card.

"Part of the official verification of the signature includes verification of the identity of the signer, i.e. usually the document number is indicated on the verification clause. The number of the document can then be compared with the number provided by the person being verified and with the numbers that we will use next," says Kohoutek.

## AI is on both sides of the barricade

With **increasingly sophisticated AI technology**, it is clearly challenging for people without training to detect fake documents. This is also why a different form of automation is being used to combat these practices. Czech startup [Resistant AI](https://resistant.ai), for example, is creating a form of artificial intelligence that helps customers defend themselves against attacks by other AIs.

"**Altered documents are most often encountered in cases of financial fraud.** But as the creation of forgeries becomes easier and as more and more processes move into the digital world, the number of frauds outside the financial world is also rising," says Resistant AI founder and CEO Martin Rehák, who has just received a CZK 240 million injection from UK fund Notion Capital.

In its practice, the firm, which has already raised nearly $20 million from investors including Google, most often encounters fraud in proving income for rental property, job applications, student admissions and immigration procedures.

According to Rehak, **recognizing a professionally forged document in digital form is very difficult for a person to do and nearly impossible without professional experience.**

"**There are software tools and services** commonly available on the Internet today that give counterfeiters much more comfort than the proverbial Photoshop and offer the convenience of counterfeiting as a service for a fee," Rehák confirms.

**He also sees a steady increase in the technical quality of counterfeits** on the part of attackers, along with the range of fraud. And according to the founder of Resistant AI, this makes sense.

"Why should criminals invest the work of programmers and develop sophisticated tools to generate one counterfeit when they can generate and monetize thousands of them with similar effort," Rehak believes.

**With the development of AI, the battle over who will have the proverbial edge**, the fraudsters or the digital protectors, has shifted completely. Those who **do not use AI methods in their work** will not have the edge, according to Rehak.

"A team of researchers, engineers and fraud detection experts are working on developing detectors that detect a wide range of counterfeits. Without artificial intelligence, this would be completely impossible. These are not routinely deployed techniques, but specific models that we are constantly improving," concludes Rehák.

Source: https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/falesne-doklady-ai-policie.A230627_091953_domaci_nema?

AI helps create fake documents, recruiters often don't recognise them

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