A big reason why a lot of companies are trying to push people back to the office is they have low confidence that line managers will catch these kinds of problems, and many more - including 'the guys working 4 jobs and barely doing anything for us', the 'guy starting his own company that competes with us at the same time as working for us', the 'guy who farms out all his work to subs in India', etc.
It's easy to say 'if they don't notice, then clearly it's not a problem' - but it has downstream effects, like broken products, huge legal liabilities for the company including often scary handling of customer data to make it work, and morale hits as other folks pick up on things like this happening and being uncaught.
These are real, albeit currently low percentage/high risk things that happen. The more people get away with it, the higher the percentages of people who will try (people rationalize it to themselves as 'everyone else is doing it', and 'I'd be foolish to not do the same thing everyone else is'.).
The biggest issue I've seen with remote work (in practice), is it makes it really hard for a manager to see and actually understand what's happening (not just what people SAY is happening, which is rarely the same thing), and makes it easier for employees to hide things they don't want others to see. Which leads to more of everything from undiscovered-until-too-late burnout, to team members who have no idea what to do or how to do it, to opportunists grifting.
> A big reason why a lot of companies are trying to push people back to the office
Which is kind of useless for most of the points you described at the end. There are plenty of comments here really proving that you can scam even in person interviews. Let's say you are not scam, you pass an interview. You can still do all of those things while you work.
The only way to prevent this is by having keyloggers and similar tools on the work laptop so that you can actually see what people do. And even then, if someone does "enough", would you really check? Probably most people nowadays wouldn't care, as long as you deliver.
The truth is: most people are honest, they do "normal" work, they get a raise, etc. Then there is a percent of people which exploits the system. A system that let's be honest tries to profit from them too by giving lower wages, etc.
It’s harder/nearly impossible to scam at scale in person.
It’s also way more obvious and personal when it happens, and it’s a lot easier to actually physically arrest someone if it gets really weird or out of hand, not that it was common for that to happen.
I think we’re seeing the birth of a new industry, the equivalent of Nigerian email scams, but with job interviews.
I heard a story about this happening at an Indian subsidiary of an American company, the person interviewed by the US manager was not the person that actually took the role ! It was discovered a few months in as the quality was not as expected (the person was actually a developer but not nearly as good as the one that was interviewed, he hired the interviewed person to pass the interview).
