I really desperately need a job right now and I'm not even getting interviews at fast food places.
It's really starting to look like I'm going to have to just lie my way into having a better resume. I have no moral problem with this, but I'm worried I'll be asked to verify things. I did some volunteer work for a library when I was in high school one summer. This was like five years ago. Would I have any problem if I extended that couple months out to a couple years?
Mostly I'm worried they'll call the library themselves to verify. It seems unlikely to me that they would still have a record of this, but I'm not sure.
You could look online for say, Mexican restaurants and sometimes they'll still be listed with "This location has closed" somewhere in the reviews. Unless they knew someone that worked there I really don't think they could check. No one is going to ask for your tax returns from a previous restaurant job.
Definitely a step above this idea but I once asked a guy how he had gotten hired as a network admin, he told me he'd created a dummy LLC and included one of his friends as an employee there and gave them the friends number, then claimed that he'd been working as a senior network admin at that business for the past several years.
There is always the chance that they could do a background check to look at your employment history but I really don't think that's common for the types of positions you're looking at. Outside of lying about an arrest record, primarily theft, I just don't think they really care to spend the extra money on an in-depth report.
Granted this was over a decade ago but I've been hired at large companies that would absolutely have the resources to check into these kinds of things and just omitted jobs where I was fired in my employment history. I have a friend that got fired once when they did a background check months after she'd been working there because she had a DUI that she didn't disclose.