He Planted a Digital Bomb Before Getting Fired [The Bad Hire Ep. 44]

00:00:00 He's one of the smartest bad hires we've heard. For real. That's insane. He's a real life supervillain. It takes investigators years to trace everything back to him. I guess he's convicted and he goes to jail for four years in federal prison. 11 years he worked there. This is the bad hire, the show with the best stories about the worst employees. We fired him, of course. People are crazy. It's like an HR nightmare. Right. One bad hire stole all of it. Crazy stuff. She got what she deserved. Oh. I'm your host, Ken Monroe. And every week we dive into real life stories from the wild world of work. And what can happen when the wrong person gets the job.

00:00:41 These stories aren't just crazy. They're cautionary tales about lessons learned the hard way. Let's get started. Welcome back to the bad hire. The show where we tell some of the best stories about the wild world of work. And HR holding the line. And everywhere they can. Yeah. That's hard to say. The wild world of work. That's kind of hard to say. Wild world of work. We kind of made a tongue twister for you. That's our bad. We've got Morgan and Nathan with us. Hey, guys. Hey. What's up, guys? Appreciate you both. Our second show of the day. Yep. We're kind of doing some back-to-back episodes right now. For sure. Yeah. Hey, you guys know the drill. Every week we get together.

00:01:21 We release these weekly. And we just jump into stories about some of the worst interviews, best interviews, flame mounts, first day bombs, all the different things that make hiring people and recruiting people really challenging, hard work. And so a little bit of a tip of the hat to our HR leaders and recruiters for all they have to deal with when it comes to the wild world of people. Yep. Yep. People. Yep. For sure. So, and remember our $10,000 contest. Submit a story. Win $10,000 if you're the best of the year. It's coming up here in a couple months. I think we'll be wrapping up a year's worth of shows. We'll give away $10,000.

00:02:02 So, if you have a really good story, send it to us. We would love to have it. Yep. Right? Yeah, that'd be cool. Isn't that crazy? We're almost at one year of the show. Yeah, it's nuts. Totally nuts. Yeah. Crazy. Thanks for everybody. Continue to do really good. I think we said in the last show, I think you guys know we had 3.6 million views across our social media last month. It's really driven and we're doing again on another nice path this month. And so, congrats to you guys for creating some buzz around the bad hire and around the BeachX brand. It's kind of cool. Yeah, it's been fun. Thanks everybody for watching and listening and sharing our random clips on TikTok. For sure. We had 150,000. Engagements.

00:02:42 Engagements. Yeah, people are in comments and sharing and it's so funny. Yeah, I think that the relatable stories are hidden people. Yeah, for sure. It's pretty cool. I love it. We should do an episode reacting to hate comments though. Okay. I would love to. I hope we have time. Yeah, if we have time. It'll be too long. It's not often they agree with me. It's okay. It happens to me. Somebody called me a fool last episode. Oh, really? Oh, you made it though. I know. I made it. Guys, I'm a fool. Yeah. All right, so here we go. All right. Let me get going. So here's a story. So we have a software developer who's been with us for 11 years. He's good at his job. Genuinely good at his job. When a restructuring comes through and his role gets cut and we assume he'll adapt, you

00:03:27 know, whatever. That's what people do. He does not adapt. Okay. He writes code. The most important piece of code he writes is a function with a very specific purpose. Check whether his credentials, check whether his credentials are still active in our network. If yes, do nothing. If no, if his account has been disabled, it's been, uh, if he's been terminated, execute everything else. Get rid of, you know, probably turn everything off. Yeah. So everything else includes indefinite loops designed to crash our servers, delish, oh, wait. So. That's crazy. So he like. He writes a function to check whether. Okay. So this guy writes a function. He's smart. To check whether his credentials are still active in the network.

00:04:09 If they are not active, meaning he doesn't work there anymore. He's not there anymore. All right. His account, uh, or if his account's been disabled, it's, it's, it runs this, it runs this code. Wow. Makes sense. Okay. And that includes running some infinite loops designed to crash out our servers, deletion of employee profile files, a global lockout that would kick every single user off the, every system. The moment his account went dark. Some James Bond type stuff here. He named some of his other functions in Japanese and Chinese. Oh my gosh. Words that turned out to translate to things like destruction and lethargy. Oh man. That's good. He knew exactly what he was building.

00:04:49 So this guy, yeah, he just built this. He's a screen slayer from Incredibles too. That's it. He's like, you know. Yeah. He's, he's laid off in September and the kill switch, you know, that he built. Yeah. In case he, uh, you know, fires and, you know, we spend days scrambling. That means way in advance he had to think. This is when he probably started that day one. Listen, if I ever leave here and it's not my, it's still not on my terms, you know, I'm going to crush them. That's like me writing a bunch of automated emails to go out if you guys ever let me go and it's just like the boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's not good at it. We spent days scrambling to restore our systems. They got hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.

00:05:29 Absolutely. You know, employees locked out of their own work. Complete chaos across our entire organization because this guy did this. It takes investigators years to trace everything back to him. But I guess he's convicted and he goes to jail for four years in federal prison. 11 years he worked there. Okay. My question is how did he- He worked there for 11 years. Okay, but how did he get put in prison for four years when some of those people stole like $1.3 million last episode and they were like 12 months in prison? Yeah. I don't know. That's insane. I don't get this. I mean, he worked pretty hard at like, you know, not working. That's a lot. That's a lot of, I feel like that's a lot of work. Maybe it's just a couple lines of code. Just to build a trap that he said was a lot of work. Yeah. It's just shocking to me because he was there 11 years, you know, and so to-

00:06:12 He's been plotting for 11 years. To have that over your head for 11 years plotting what you're going to do if they ever get rid of me. It seems, you know- It's kind of devious. Very vengeful. It's incredibly- Devious. Man, what do you even get out of that? Except for just spite and just don't binge. It's not like it benefits you at all. No. He's one of the smartest bad hires we've heard. For real. That's insane. He's a real life supervillain. Over you. That is a supervillain for sure. Over you, he's clawed. Let's meet Jeff. We got Jeff Atkinson again on the show. He did a guest segment. He's the CEO of Huckabye, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Huckabye is an SEO and AEO company that helps you get your company well seen online

00:06:58 through search engines and through AI engines that are sourcing content. And so apparently they do a really phenomenal job. But he's got some great experience in hiring people. And he told a crazy story last episode about someone still on $250,000. So let's see what he's got here. Yeah. He's going to know the story. I had this guy that worked for me who was Mormon, white male, six kids, and was like a C-minus employee. And like every six months, he would go to my assistant and ask for time on my calendar to talk to me. And he'd come into my office and ask for a raise and a promotion. And I'd ask him why I should give him that.

00:07:40 And he'd say something like, well, you know, Cecilia and I had our third child, you know, and I've been here for five years, Jeff. And like, he expected it. Like, he expected just by being a white male with a lot of kids. And he was, had somehow survived working there for years. And it drove me nuts, that entitlement that here you have females kicking ass compared to this guy. And he wants me to promote them. My first VP was a extremely overweight woman, which was the first VP, not the first VP at the company, but was my first VP, which people really took notice of that.

00:08:24 I was hiring based on meritocracy and I wanted diversity. And I did get the chance to fire this guy. And it was the most satisfying firing of my life. Yeah. Oh, Jeff. Go, Jeff. I love these people's honesty today. Jeff's right to be aggravated. You know, when you're in that seat and people come to you and their reason for, especially when they're mid, and then their reason is. Oh, mid. You dropped mid in there. I did. And then. You could use mid. And then their reason for, you know, that is their life, their life circumstance. Yeah, like you asked him to go have six kids.

00:09:04 Like, hey, I got a new car. I got a new car payment. Yeah. I need to make more money. Or I've been here. I just got a bigger apartment. I need to make more money. Yeah. So, and that, you know, when you're in that place of listening to that, and especially when it's someone who is a C performer, which, you know, you wish you didn't have, but you do. And, you know, that's the reasoning. Hey, I've been here a while. You know, what you hear is, hey, I've been here a while. You've put up with my mediocre performance for a really long time, but I got a new payment in my life and I need money. I need you to pay for it.

00:09:45 That's what you hear. And, you know, you're like, you know, it's very, very difficult because you, you know, you, you want to coach them, you know, but, but they, when they hear the word no coming, oftentimes take it personal because they've put financial stress on yourself. Well, stuff. Cause like you said, you know, you want to be able to promote and help, you know, in the company based off meritocracy, like you're saying, and not just like, oh, I've been here. I'm here. I'm in the building, you know, but some people, I guess like view it that way. Yeah. I mean, Jeff said, did say one thing I was like, eh, you know, he's like, um, like it was some type of, uh, privilege or X, you know, expectation, you know, uh, entitlement.

00:10:29 Yeah. And I was like, I don't find that as, uh, uh, specific to any one category of people. It's just, there's just. Yeah. People. Who feel entitled. Yeah. Who feel entitled. You know, I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't, it comes across from every, every, same as there can be great people in any category of people. You can, your very best people can be from any category, you know, your, your mediocre people can be from any category too. So, you know, you get that same request from C players where, you know, it just happens. Yeah. No, I agree. Yeah. You know, interesting point of view. Before we dive back into the chaos on the bad hire, this episode is brought to you by

00:11:14 B-Checks. Hiring shouldn't feel like rolling the dice. Background checks should come with great tech, seamless integration, and customer service that delivers. That's B-Checks. Lightning fast results, unmatched accuracy, built in fraud prevention. We help you hire the right people. Now, B-Checks plugs into over 100 HRIS and ATS systems. So your background checks run smooth, fast, and backed by top level service. Protect your team. Protect your reputation. Protect your sanity. Go to B-Checks.io. That's B-C-H-E-X dot I-O. All right. So Nathan, what's up?

00:11:55 All right. See, I think I just got one story today, but this was, I think we, we got this story. So it's, I work in healthcare credentialing, and boy, do I have a bad hire story for you. Oh, I love it. This girl had a background as a certified medical assistant, a legitimate credential, and it's a real job, but it's not, however, a nursing license, which is something that you need for this job. What she obtains instead are other nurses' licenses. These were stolen from the registry, attached to her own name on job applications, and presented with enough professional confidence that across her career, she is hired as a registered nurse or a licensed practical nurse at more than 40 healthcare facilities.

00:12:39 Terrifying. She moves around deliberately, never staying too long in one place, just long enough to collect some paychecks, short enough that a deep reference check becomes unlikely. 40 facilities over a career built entirely on impersonation. I don't know how many patients received care from her, I don't know how many received medications from her, or how many assessments were filed, or how many clinical decisions were made by somebody trained in medical terminology, but never in the judgment behind it, never actually got that actual nursing license. That's insane. Those numbers don't appear in any of the court documents, and they probably never will, but she was eventually caught, charged, and sentenced for impersonating a nurse at more than 40

00:13:22 facilities. Wow. That's horrible. So that's crazy. She's like, hi, right there. Yeah, it just speaks to just the importance of the verification process. Oh, yeah. Credentialing is part of the verification process. Yeah. And doing their credentialing, doing their license. Something was said earlier today or yesterday that was talking, and maybe it was a statistic that we saw online from a social media clip, but it was saying like 60% of companies check credentials. Yeah. Yeah. Healthcare is required for sure. And yeah, it just talks about having, you know, you got to get it done, and you got to do a good job before they go to work. Yeah. I'm surprised that none of those reference checks or any kind of check was done as she's

00:14:03 going from one location to the next. Yeah. Yeah. That's weird. That's weird. Yeah. That's weird. Because she was kind of saying the story was like, I stayed just long enough so that a deep reference check couldn't be done. Yeah. But it's like, wouldn't that be done before you even go to the location? Yeah. I guess not. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of where I was at. It was like, I don't know how she's moving around between these jobs, but I mean, in the hospitals that we work with, the B-checks, they don't hire them before that is done. Mm-hmm. But when that comes back and it's done, it's, you know, it's much, that story made it seem like hospitals are a little loose, letting people come in and work for a while before they get around to the checks. Yeah. And that is not any hospital I've ever been associated with. Oh, for sure. Right. I mean, we've got very large hospital, you know, customers and all the way down to small.

00:14:50 And I don't know anybody who's cutting corners and hiring people and not vetting them in a hospital. For sure. They take that hiring and vetting so seriously. I think there was some desperation during COVID though. Yeah. Healthcare. Yeah. Maybe that's what the story was. Maybe that's when that occurred. Because like, I know during COVID people were just desperate for workers. Yeah. And it probably just was such a rush to hire somebody during that time. They were like, I mean, maybe that was skipped over or something. It's possible in a, like a temporary where you're taking in, like leasing nurses or grabbing somebody from an emergency nursing company or something. I need somebody. Yeah. And you're expecting that they've. They've got a, yeah. You know. And. Yeah. Yeah. That's a potential for risk. Yeah. She was falsifying a lot of information.

00:15:30 So who knows just what she kind of was lying about to get in there and stuff. Sure. But it was crazy. The fact that that. Luckily nobody got hurt. I know. I'm always shocked by these stories of like fake people. Like, how do you even know how to do these things? Like from watching Grey's Anatomy or like, what are we, we're just like hoping for the best. And they probably need to survive. She had a nurse's assistance. Yeah. You know. So she just tried to ratchet it up, get more pay. I guess she just knew. Yeah. She asked an assistant coming in, how do I take their blood pressure? Like how, how, like how important is the line? Yeah. Right. How important is the line? Using HR hold, like just vetting everyone ahead of time, making sure they got, I mean, you know. Yeah. The downstream risks to them not doing a good job is, you know, really, really significant.

00:16:13 Yeah. I mean, like having, you know, a loose background check on a dishwasher, no shade of dishwashers. That's one thing. But, but it's like. Yeah. But having somebody who's administrating these people medicine. Medicine. Yeah. Who knows? You know, the reality though, right? You say that, but that person can bring risk, not, you know, you think about it from, you know, oh, you know, safety of the, you know, patients, right? Yeah. But safety of employees. Yeah. That's true. You get a dishwasher who's violent criminal. Yeah. Right. And you're like, oh, we didn't do anything. And he's just a violent person. One day he gets mad in the kitchen and, you know. The knives are in there. Yeah. I mean, hurts, you know, four or five employees, you know, it's, it's just as bad.

00:16:56 Yeah. For sure. It's really so bad. Safety is important. It just has to be at every level up and down an organization. You just have to take it seriously. Vet people before you put them around your people. And that's, you know, it's one way you build trust in an organization. You know, if you, if, if I expect employees to trust and give you their best, you know, one of the ways I deliver that is I deliver a safe environment for them. Right. And they know that I take everyone, you know, that I let in the organization. We take it seriously. We're going to vet them. We're going to make sure they're safe to be next to you. That's, that, that's, that is a huge trust signal to, to, to employees. Yeah. What do you got going on today? All right. Mine's also a healthcare story and very similar. So I work in healthcare hiring and we bring on a nurse who comes with a license number that

00:17:39 checks out in the state registry. Valid, verified, exactly what we're looking for. And we hire her. We don't know. What we don't know is that the license number belongs to someone else entirely. Before applying at any healthcare facility, she searches the state registry for licensed nurses with a similar last name to her own and takes their license numbers. The insight is if you want to call it, that is a name similarity. If the registry shows Gonzalez Maria and she applies as Gonzalez Carmen, a cursory license check confirms that the number is valid without flagging the first name mismatch. The license checks out. Nobody looks closer. Seven employees over two years, behavioral health, rehab, skilled nursing, home health.

00:18:21 She moves through all of them. Wow. Patients receive care from someone who has never passed a nursing exam. State investigators tie more than 548,000 in Medicaid overpayments to services she allegedly performed while unlicensed. My goodness. She was charged with felony healthcare fraud in 2026. And here's what I keep coming back to. Every one of those seven facilities looked up the license number. Every one of them saw it was valid. Everyone hired her. Not one of them picked up the phone and called the actual license holder to ask, did you recently take a position here? That call takes 45 seconds and seven employers made none of them. Yeah. I don't know who did those, but that would not get through our organization. No, not at all.

00:19:02 That's what I thought because with the alias checks and things like that. You just would not. Yeah. You know. It would flag in immediately. Just going by last name. Yeah. A last name verification check. Absolutely not. Not in 100 years. Yeah. Would not happen. Just wouldn't happen. Wow. That's just a weak system. Yeah. Because we talk about a lot with hiring because there's a whole alias checks because there can be somebody who slips in this system because their name is Richard, but then they put on Ricky under their background check. So then like all their criminal stuff gets missed, but really like you have to have the technology like B-Checks does that checks for all the aliases, the first and last name, which is kind of that's basic, you know. Yeah. But some people just have weak systems and when you have a weak system, then you have a weak

00:19:45 infrastructure. A lot of times when you move that stuff in house, it becomes more difficult. It's not people's primary and only job, you know, it's a piece of something that they're doing rather than, you know, so they have, don't have as good a technology. They don't have as good as training. They don't have, you know, whatever it might be. It's they're, they're trying to do it fast. And as one of 55 different things that they got to work on that day to onboard people and train people and get people to where they're supposed to be. There's a lot going on in an HR department, man. There is a lot, you know, when you're recruiting and trying to get some, there is a lot going on and so it's one of the reasons I think they outsource a lot, you know, many of them outsource this because the highly focused technical way that can be approached and you can avoid

00:20:25 a mistake like that. So what's kind of sad is that the names weren't even similar, like Carmen and Maria, like if it was Marie and Maria, like maybe, but Carmen and Maria. Yeah. You would get that. Right. Yeah. But yeah, this is, it's a little different. Yeah, it is. It shouldn't, it shouldn't have been missed, but yeah. Dang. Man, those are crazy, crazy stories. Crazy stories. Those are similar stories as there are ones. Yeah. I think there's a, you know, it's hard, it's, it's hard to believe there would be a ton of license fraud, right? It's, it's hard to believe that could, that could happen a lot. Yeah. It's just the filter. Um, it, it, when, when stuff like that happens, it's gotta be a breakdown, a breakdown in policy,

00:21:07 a breakdown in procedure, you know, and the perfect timing of someone coming through that breakdown. So, you know, but I don't know. I just, um. Well, seven years aligns with COVID for her. Yeah. And then she got arrested in 2026. When under duress, under massive pressure, you know, you think about that with HR teams. I think about this a lot in schools, right? The amount of pressure they're under as in recruiting in schools, because all they're hiring, the majority, I won't say all, the majority they're hiring happens in a really super compressed situation. Yeah. And they have complex regulatory, uh, hoops to get through, you know, that a lot of employers

00:21:47 don't. I mean, I often say being in HR in a school, in recruiting is one of the most complex, toughest, uh, roles as a recruiter. Yeah. Because you are, you know, it is very difficult, very compressed. Yeah. And you got to hire, and, and there is no, uh, week late, there's going to be kids in the classroom on August 27th. Yeah. And you got to have somebody in there. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Think about the pressure of that. You know, when a, when a background check goes long, then that's when they're like freaking out. When. Okay. You need a certain amount of volunteers. You need a certain amount of staff. A lot of times that's how sometimes things, you know, process breaks down. Yeah. Morgan's exactly right. When you have the pressure of something like a COVID or something like that, or working

00:22:30 in industry, there's tremendous pressure to place, you know, systems break down if they're not, if they're not locked down. Hey, appreciate you guys. Yeah. Thank you guys for watching the show. Today was really good. Yeah. I enjoyed the nursing stories. Some good health care stories. And Jeff. And Jeff again. Yeah. We'll show you all, Jeff. We'll, we'll tag them on LinkedIn when we post this. Yeah, for sure. Hey, we appreciate you guys. Hey, submit us your story. We'd love to see it. Be a guest. Do a guest segment like Jeff did. And, and come on the show. Tell a great hiring story. Give us a good one. Give us a, give us a flame out. Write us a story. Go to thebadhire.com. Get all that done. We love to have your story. And we're going to give 10,000 bucks to the best story of the year. For sure. Here in a couple of months. So get your name in the hat.

00:23:10 Take your shot. Big check. You know, yeah. Big check. Yeah. And get it done. But until next time, we appreciate you. And we'll see you. Thanks everybody. Bye guys. Bye guys. Thank you.