How to verify an Argentine remote hire before you extend the offer

You interviewed the engineer over video, the code test came back clean, and the LinkedIn history checks out. The offer is drafted. Then you remember the alerts: in 2026 the FBI, the US Department of Justice and a multi-country advisory all described fake remote candidates — stolen identities, fabricated credentials, deepfaked interviews — and Gartner predicts one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake by 2028. If you already run Checkr or Sterling for your US hires, the gap is not whether to check. It is that nobody has told you what a check in Argentina actually covers.

Here is the guide we wish someone had written for the first company that asked us. It lists what you can verify in Argentina, what each document really proves, and how to get it done without waiting weeks.

1. The criminal record: the Certificado de Antecedentes Penales

This is the one document every Argentine check should turn on. The Certificado de Antecedentes Penales is issued by the Registro Nacional de Reincidencia, the national criminal records registry. The candidate requests it themselves through Mi Argentina, the government's identity app, and downloads a signed PDF. The paper is only as good as its validation: the certificate carries a verifiable code, and a real check validates it against the registry rather than trusting the PDF in the inbox. A certificate that cannot be validated is a finding, not a pass.

Two things this document does not do: it is not a US-style public-records sweep (there is no equivalent of a county courthouse search), and it says nothing about pending cases outside its scope. Anyone selling you an "Argentine background check" without it is selling you a LinkedIn review.

2. Identity: the DNI and a liveness check

The DNI is Argentina's national ID card, and every adult carries one. Ask for the front and back, then match the person: a short selfie video recorded at upload time, compared against the DNI photo, catches the most common fraud — a different, real person completing the process for the candidate. This is where deepfaked interviews and identity swaps surface, and where a transcript review of your interview recordings helps less than a document tied to a live face.

3. Employment history: references who answer in Spanish

Past-employer references in Argentina are answered by email far more reliably than in the US, but they are answered in Spanish and on local business hours. The failure mode is not a lying reference; it is the reference that never existed. Have someone contact the company directly — not an address the candidate supplied — and confirm dates and role. A check that only relays the candidate's own contact list verifies nothing.

4. Education: the título

University degrees (títulos) can be checked with the issuing university, and some forgeries are obvious to anyone who has seen the real document layout. This is the slowest check — universities answer on their own schedule — which is why a report should mark a check unverifiable with the dates of each attempt instead of holding the whole report hostage to one slow registrar.

What this costs and how long it takes

International checks from the big US providers start around $32 per country with add-ons and run about five business days, built by companies that do not know which Argentine records are real. Doing it yourself means asking a candidate to hand over personal documents with no process around them — a privacy problem of its own. The candidate-driven route fixes both: the candidate supplies their own records with written consent, guided in Spanish, and every claim in the English report points to its source.

That is exactly what lumvet does, for a flat $49 per candidate, one-time, with the report in three business days. You send one link, the candidate completes it in about 20 minutes, and you pay only once they finish. Start a verification — or see the sample report to see what comes back.

lumvet itself is run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is how a two-person company can verify Argentine hires for US startups at all.