Just lie, say self employment as like… Anything. IT services are great for this because nobody can fucking check anything if it doesn’t exist anymore. Or just “painter and decorator” is pretty good. Gardening services. The kinds of things you can cold call people for and there’ll be odd jobs people need doing.

Pretty much anyone could pretend to have done a variety of IT services as self employed without any ability to verify any of it. Say you were the top seller for search optimisation services on Fiverr. It’s impossible to verify and easily makes more than enough income for one person a year to justify it.