I graduated with a Computer Science degree from a fairly decent school years ago. I do not consider myself the best or brightest for the job market, but I never turned down a job for being beneath me. I applied endlessly to entry level jobs and have been fairly ignored. The only ones getting back to me are jobs that I applied for out of desperation in the service/retail industry.
So for a couple of years I worked at a grocery store after college, working early morning shifts without missing a day and stacking shelves. I do as much learning as I can, learned multiple programming languages and have built a few nifty programs, but I'd still get ignored no matter what. I changed up my resumes endlessly, gotten career advice from counsellors, have gone to networking events, and nothing has ever really panned out. Ironically, Counsellors have told me that my resumes and cover letters are good and they're puzzled as to why I'm ignored and almost never get an interview or offers. I applied to jobs outside of my field, and again ignored unless I wanted to work in a temp job as a secretary.
I've been doubting myself for not even being able to get an interview, and if I do interview, getting a rejection letter every single time. I had an email from Amazon once, but they said my skills weren't what they needed at the time. I tried again, refining on interview skills and everything I studied just to get another rejection. I had a couple of other interviews where the jobs were really misaligned with my skills, so I started giving up.
Out of frustration (and looming student loans), I found myself resorting to making money from less admirable means.
I've had run ins with the dark web before but never took it seriously. So I used some money I made from my grocery store job to buy credit cards, and long behold I was good at carding things. First shop I carded made about $400,000 dollars in a span of 3 months. Then I moved on to check fraud using stolen identities and made quite a bit more. It's very tedious creating drop accounts with banks to work for check fraud or ACH fraud, but it's been working consistently to fund a lifestyle I would've had if I was working at Google or a blossoming tech startup, so I've been somewhat addicted to the life. Instead of working an 8 hour shift unloading boxes, I've been living a healthy lifestyle, exercising, partying, travelling overseas, and putting more time to reading and learning (learning Spanish and Mandarin). My girlfriend and family think that I work as a freelance developer, but I've been making money fraudulently now for at least 3-4 years. Since I was using bitcoin to cash out, I was able to make some decent speculative gains in late 2017, enough to buy a house in the city without a mortgage and buy a decent car. I always paid taxes too, so the IRS isn't really after me.
I've been competent enough to make up projects out of my head and make up details that could fool other people in my field. But eventually I decided to actually hire a couple of freelancers to help me make some of these projects real, so that's what occupies my resume at the moment.
The problem is that I don't want to be a fraud for much longer, it's to the point where I know that if I continue, I will probably be caught. But I don't want to just be a lowly unemployed person with a software degree if I can't sell my software or my skills as a developer or manager. It's been several years since my studies, and I feel like I'm just going to remain ignored.
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