The next time you come across a resume that's too good to be true, add a couple of extra items to the "abilities" segment: envy and immorality.

Experts say people who lie on their CVs are likely to have been unemployed for a long time and appear to be motivated by jealousy for other people who have landed jobs when they haven't.

"Envy was one of the things we found that really mattered," said Michelle Duffy, a professor of work and organizations at the University of Minnesota, and the co-author of a paper on resume fraud.

Resume fakers are also worth catching, because the researchers found that those who are comfortable exaggerating their skills also are more comfortable being immoral in other ways.

Take the case of Mathew Martoma, the former SAC Capital Advisers trader who was convicted Thursday of conspiracy and securities fraud charges. Years before the trading scandal, court transcripts revealed that he had been expelled from Harvard after to submit for a clerkship.

"If you hire somebody who's misrepresented their resume, not only might you get somebody who has lesser qualifications but you might get somebody who's likely to steal from the organization or commit other types of fraud," said Brian Dineen, an associate professor management at Purdue University who also co-wrote the paper on fraud.

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"If you hire somebody who has misrepresented their resume, not only might you get somebody who has lesser qualifications but ... somebody who's likely to steal from the organization or commit other types of fraud," said Brian Dineen, an associate professor management at Purdue University and a co-author of the paper.

The researchers found that people who lied didn't necessarily start out intending to embellish or fake their credentials. But the longer they were unemployed with no job in sight, the more tempting it became.

Dineen likens it to sticking to that New Year's resolution: During the first week of January it was probably pretty easy to get to the gym and avoid the chocolate box, but by mid-February it's harder to be so virtuous.

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"Job seekers will channel their envy toward greater effort early on," Dineen said. "But then later on they will channel their envy toward resume fraud."

It's not clear how often people embroider or fabricate parts of their resume. A survey of hiring managers released by CareerBuilder in 2008 found that nearly half of those surveyed had caught someone lying at some point. Less than 10 percent of workers surveyed admitted to lying.

