> Making a law isn’t going to change a thing. Even if you did, what company is going to spend resources tracking down the likely fake identity of someone applying for a job just to hand it to law enforcement for them to ignore in their backlog forever?

I missed the part where I included that or any strategy on how it would be used as a deterrent. Clearly that's not how it is done as you pointed out, but you make it seem as if laws have no value at all, which is a rather naive take. Fraud is already illegal FYI.

I don't have a solution, other than to make a call to the people who are elected to find those solutions, if they are able to. If they can't or won't, then it is a good thing that phone call was free anyway.

Absolutely correct, just making laws themselves have little effect over anything. Enforcement is the key. For most laws that step is an afterthought. But there are creative ways to do it.

> applicants doing fake job applications … stolen identities

What I don’t get is what’s the economic incentive for this behaviour

- It can be a side effect to keep your unemployment insurance which is conditional upon proving you are sending applications at a given pace. I'd probably need to apply to random jobs if I qualified for it because there isn't a role opening in my niche weekly to fullfil the criteria here. I never had to because I was ineligible for other reasons every time I was unemployed and could have used support but that's a whole other can of worms)

- I heard its a thing to get n jobs you're not qualified for to get at least the first few month salary "for free" (as an individual or as a pawn from a larger organized fraud). Not sure how common or how much truth there is to it though.

How exactly does someone who applies with a stolen identity get anything out of doing so?