The Fake Translator's CV, what is the purpose of it?

As a translation agency, we usually receive around 40-50 unsolicited resumes a week from translators looking for freelance work. Not that I am complaining, I like to think that it implies that we are a desirable translation agency to work with. But recently we have started to see a huge increase in resumes that are quite obviously fake. At the same time we have recently seen a significant number of recurring translation tenders on several online tendering sites where the contractor requests a full CV for any applicants; these contractors are posting multiple projects over several months, all purporting to have pay rates well beyond industry standards, yet the contracts are never awarded. Is this CV harvesting perhaps related to the fake resumes we are receiving?

Before I go into how we are spotting these fake resumes, I wonder what the sender has to benefit from sending me a resume for a task they are quite obviously unsuited for? Several opportunities to profit arise.

1. The sender could hope to get on to an agency database untested (or even if tested they could very well pay someone else to do the test and then present the work as their own), receive some work, pump it through a machine translation tool, send it back, and hope to get paid before they got found out.

2.  I suppose the sender could also be a competitor (although I think it highly unlikely, as if they were in the business their resumes should be of a lot better quality). By getting through the verification and testing process they could learn a fair bit about our systems, as well as if they receive work from us they could potentially identify some of our customers.

3. Or could it be some trojan or virus embedded in the attachment posing as a CV? Yet we run multiple levels of virus detection software, that is constantly updated on the fly, and have never had an infection in 12 years of doing business.

I can't really see what the benefit of it would be? Firstly, we would never use a translator untested and unverified. And every translation has a second editor and a proofreader, so any machine translation would be quickly identified and the perpetrator deleted. So what is the benefit for these people sending me fake CVs posing as a translator???

As to how we are spotting them, while I won't give away all our secrets, here are some of the most obvious errors found to date in a few fake Japanese resumes received recently.

- A translator referred to themselves as "(surname) kun". "Kun" is a Japanese honorific that, like "san", is never used for oneself, only in reference to another person. Straight away I know the person is not Japanese because no Japanese would ever make such an error.

- A translator put their address as "Hamamatsu City, Toyama". There is no Hamamatsu in Toyama, it is in Shizuoka.

- Very poor English and Japanese writing skills, resumes riddled with typos, spelling mistakes and bad grammar.

- Receiving multiple emails from supposedly different people on the same day, with the same subject and body text, but with different resumes.

- Finally, when searching the name of a translator who claims 15 years freelance experience, I found zero reference to them in any of the major online translation freelance portals.

I would love to hear from other agencies who have been receiving such fake emails, really just to try to understand the purpose of it all. Any ideas anyone?