Deel targets remote hiring fraud with new identity checks

Hiring someone you’ve only met on a video call is now a security question. In July 2026, the US State Department and the FBI joined agencies from ten other countries in warning that North Korean IT workers are using false identities, forged documents and AI to win remote work. New Zealand was one of those countries, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade co-signing the alert.

An FBI official has also said the bureau found one of these workers working remotely for a US federal agency. Earlier, a US Department of Justice case found North Korean IT workers had been placed at more than 300 US companies using 68 stolen identities.

That’s the problem global HR and payroll platform Deel is aiming its new product at. Deel Security checks who a company is hiring from the first application through to employment, across more than 150 countries. Deel sells the product, and the research it cites in support comes partly from its own survey.

What Deel’s survey found

Deel ran the survey with research consultancy Censuswide. It asked 1,011 HR professionals in the UK and the US, so there’s no New Zealand data in it.

Two-thirds (66%) said their organisation had seen more suspicious or potentially fraudulent remote worker applications in the past 12 months. The survey found 93% were concerned about deepfake or AI-generated workers, and 34% said their current identity checks were no longer enough.

Some industries reported suspicious applicants more often than others, with IT at 75%, defence at 72% and crypto at 71%. Deel reads the results as a shift away from one-time document checks towards identity checks that are live, continuous and reviewed by people.

Deel also points to Gartner, which has predicted that by 2028 one in four job candidate profiles worldwide will be fake. Background screening company First Advantage, which also sells identity checks, found in its 2026 Global Trends Report that 89% of HR hiring managers plan to add background screening and identity verification within the next two years.

“Fraud comes in layers, and it is changing fast,” says Alex Bouaziz, co-founder and CEO of Deel. “AI has made fake resumes, deepfakes, and stolen identities cheap to produce and hard to spot. The threat does not end at the offer, either.”

How the checks work

Deel Security looks for risk signals across CVs, digital footprints, interviews and identity documents. It flags deepfake or proxy interviewers, and matches a live selfie to a government-issued ID before an offer is made. After someone is hired, it keeps verifying their identity at key security checkpoints.

It works with Deel’s own applicant tracking system and with others, and connects to identity management tools such as Okta. That puts the risk signals in front of recruiting and security teams in the systems they already use. Every verification has an exportable audit trail.

Deel says the product supports human review rather than replacing it. Each high-risk flag comes with a report explaining it and is reviewed by a Deel fraud expert, and the final call stays with the customer’s own hiring and security teams.

The product is built on technology from Clarity, an AI security company Deel has bought, and Deel has already used it in its own internal hiring.