North Korea's Remote Employees: Five Helpers in the USA Plead Guilty
For years, North Korea has allowed people to work in the USA via the internet to get salaries. Now it's becoming clear in the US how this is possible.
(Image: Jiri Flogel/Shutterstock.com)
In the past few days, five individuals in the USA have pleaded guilty to supporting North Korea's fundraising program through IT employees allegedly working from home. The US Department of Justice has now made this public and stated that in these cases alone, more than 136 companies were affected by the fraud scheme. The regime in North Korea had thus generated over 2.2 million US dollars. The identities of 18 people from the USA were also compromised. In conjunction with the announcement, the US government has also provided further insights into the methods, which have been warned about for some time. In the investigations now made public, it has confiscated 15 million US dollars.
Lucrative for Helpers at Home Too
According to the announcement, three of the five individuals are on trial in the US state of Georgia. They had made their identities available to people they knew were not in the USA, with whom they could then obtain employment. All three had then connected company-provided laptops in their homes and, without permission, equipped them with remote maintenance software so that they could be controlled from abroad. For the companies, it looked as if the employees were working in the USA. All three had also helped to complete the verification procedures of the employing companies; one had even taken a drug test.
The other two defendants are a Ukrainian and a US citizen, who are on trial in Washington, D.C., and Florida. The man from Ukraine has reportedly admitted to stealing identities of people from the USA and reselling them, among other places, to North Korea, where they were used by the alleged IT employees. In total, salary payments of hundreds of thousands of US dollars were accumulated through this, and the defendant himself has reportedly agreed to pay 1.4 million US dollars. The fraud of the fifth person reportedly involves almost one million US dollars in salary payments, and the man himself has reportedly received 89,000 US dollars. One of his accomplices was arrested in the Netherlands.
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That North Korea dispatches IT workers with concealed origins to Western companies is not new. As early as 2022, the US government warned companies about the risks. At that time, it was stated that the isolated regime was sending thousands of highly qualified IT workers around the world to finance its weapons development program, which is sanctioned by the United Nations sanctioned weapons development program. The US Department of Justice's announcement underscores that a lot of money is involved. In Germany too, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has warned companies about the associated dangers. This also includes the risk of inadvertently violating sanctions against North Korea.
(mho)
