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BENGALURU: Corporate forensic teams and background verification firms are flagging cases of location spoofing, particularly among hybrid employees and gig workers. In several instances, employees have been pulled up after allegedly misrepresenting their actual work location, with such discrepancies surfacing during random audits, compliance checks, or client reviews.Investigations found that some used travel routers or similar devices to make it appear they were working from their designated base locations while actually operating from elsewhere.An employee at an MNC firm was terminated after being flagged for location spoofing while working remotely, a Reddit post said. The individual said he was with the company for a couple of years and travelled to his home country in South Asia last month due to a family emergency.

To avoid drawing attention, the employee said he used atravel router configured with acloud-based server to make it appear as though he was working from the US. According to the post, the employee was subsequently interviewed by an internal investigator and was terminated for violating the company’s business conduct guidelines by masking his actual work location.Amit Rahane, partner at EY’s forensic and integrity services, said location spoofing is no longer theoretical.

“Companies are detecting such cases through compliance audits, security reviews, and client checks rather than active surveillance. Many employees underestimate how much data is captured. Several controls were introduced during Covid to monitor moonlighting — such as IP tracking and login analytics — and these systems remain in place.

As a result, location inconsistencies are often detected even without targeted monitoring,” he said.Ashok Hariharan, co-founder and CEO of identity verification platform Idfy, said companies want to verify whether a gig worker went to a specific location — for instance, whether a delivery was genuinely attempted at a customer’s residence. Hariharan said location spoofing can be identified by combining IP and VPN intelligence with GPS based checks. Rahane said most companies avoid active surveillance due to privacy concerns, with detection typically occurring through security audits, compliance checks, or client reviews.