Risky Recruiting: Fake Passports, Secret Executions, and North Korean Kidnappers

Company employees are involved in approximately every second fraud, both as perpetrators and as facilitators. With covid came the possibility to work more from home, even from other countries, and it is easier to access sensitive data, whether it is a private business or a public institution, typically healthcare. That’s why bosses and their HR professionals should do more research on their future employees. Petr Moroz, whose company SCAUT helps screen candidates, says this from experience. His team can detect if what he claims about himself or fills in the questionnaire is true. And it also encounters targeted attacks. “For example, with identity and document checks, we see about three to five percent of problematic cases,” says the expert, who previously uncovered fraud at GE and was a forensics specialist at consulting firm EY.

What did you find out about me before the interview?

Nothing. Just recently someone asked me if I screen my friends and stuff like that. I do not do it.

Otherwise – what would you be able to find out about me?

Everyone has some web history. The question is what I am able to find out and what SCAUT. If I were to look on my own, I would have to start from your name and current employer. I would look at LinkedIn or another network.

I imagine the possibilities would be wider using your system. What do you offer clients if they want to find out more information about a job applicant?

People have the idea that we can find them an awful lot of information. It is not like that. If the company only uses the basic package, we are able to find out everything that can be obtained from publicly available sources. All you need is your first name, last name and date of birth. For example, we are talking about the trade register, commercial registers, if the person in question has executions, is insolvent, is there a search warrant for him, anywhere in the world, or if he is on a sanction list. In this case, we act as a simple integration platform that displays all this information in one place. However, if the employer wants to carry out a screening, e‑mail contact with the job applicant is also necessary. 90 percent of our clients use this option. It will always depend on whether we have access to the person in question and when they provide us with information about themselves.

Would you describe yourself as a digital detective?

We don’t see ourselves that way. The idea of ​​our company is to make complicated things simple and in one place. We don’t draw from some behind-the-scenes sources where we ask ourselves what the thing in question is. We only become interested in this when, for example, we find out that he has a forged document and bought it somewhere on the Internet. At that moment, we will start to get a little more involved together with the client. But that’s not what our tool does.

Approximately every second fraud is committed by an employee or in collaboration with him or with his contribution.

So what is that?

Simple fact-checking. The candidate stated something, we queried the source database, which could be the school or employer database or the commercial register. Then we might return the information saying that this doesn’t fit here.

If you had to say what you do in one sentence, what would it sound like?

Simply if job applicants tell the truth about themselves.

How did you get into such an activity?

I first encountered background screening when I was responsible for fraud investigation and fraud management at the largest GE bank, or rather at its Czech subsidiary GE Money. From my point of view, it was my biggest school. My team was in charge of all client fraud over half a million crowns and all employee fraud. We worked to detect fraud committed by management in the CEE region. There it began to dawn on me that an employee is behind every second fraud. I have never seen it in such detail in any company since.

Why the name SCAUT?

It’s short for screening machine, but the funny thing is that we got the scout.com domain from the Boy Scouts of America.

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