Ask HN: The "Japanese Developer" Scam

I don't think it's this. Not even close.

They do probably just want a Upwork/Fiverr account, will they do less than legal things with it and get you banned, yeah probably.

If they say yeah we do that that is 100% confirmation that they do not live in Japan.

Super tech-specific one - ask them you want to make sure they're Japanese so you'll ask them to write something every developer can write in... 5-7 seconds max. When they confirm and are waiting, ask them "at your previous/current company or your friends' companies, how do people name their personal channels? what is the specific kanji ppl put at the end?"

This kanji is super hard to google and even harder to write phonetically, but every Japanese engineer who has ever used Slack knows how because there's almost like a "hack" for writing certain other characters that end up getting converted into that kanji.

This is so fun - 1 more:

Ask them what their favorite hummus flavor is. Basically no one in Japan (even people who have lived outside of Japan) knows what hummus is (I guess Slack even tried to teach them by making it a notification sound lol)

That doesn't mean clients would want to do it. There's a component of real business in being a US face and accepting US checks at a US address for outsourcing. Of course, coming from a cold email, it's almost certainly a scam, regardless of the alleged country of developers.

edit: I clarified in the original post that I wouldn't let him use my freelance accounts. Of course I wouldn't also give him any of my banking information either.

If I were to pretend to be a potential attacker, and if I knew how this would be illegal, I would either A) lie to the mark, or B) tell the mark how to do this legally.

In case A, I would be at risk of being found out if the mark does a google search. In case B, there would be no problem.

So I don't see how this would help a potential attacker. Lying is already a given when it comes to scammers.