US law enforcement has arrested a New Jersey man and searched stashes of laptops in 16 states in a sweeping crackdown on North Korean efforts to use remote tech workers to covertly fund their weapons programs, the Justice Department said Monday.
The scheme saw North Korean tech workers – with the help of people in the US, China and elsewhere – get hired at more than 100 US companies, prosecutors said. In one case, the North Koreans stole “export-controlled US military technology”; in another, they stole the equivalent of $740,000 from a Georgia-based tech firm, according to the Justice Department.
It’s the latest in a series of national security cases that, FBI officials say, represents just a snapshot of North Korea’s efforts to use tens of thousands of overseas workers to raise revenue for its sanctions-saddled regime.
Americans are emerging as key players in the alleged activity.
Just last year, prosecutors charged an Arizona woman in a scheme that compromised the identities of 60 Americans and affected 300 US companies, including a major national TV network, a “premier” Silicon Valley tech company, and an “iconic” American car maker. A few months later, the FBI arrested a Tennessee man who allegedly helped North Korean workers pose as a US citizen as part of an effort to get the North Koreans jobs at US and British tech firms.
In one of the cases announced Monday, prosecutors allege that several individuals inside the US, including one man from New Jersey, ran so-called laptop farms by logging into more than 100 organizations’ company-issued laptops so that foreign IT workers could trick those companies into believing the workers were living in the US.
The foreign IT workers then obtained sensitive information from those companies’ servers, the department said. One of those companies is an unnamed California-based defense contractor that specializes in developing AI-powered equipment and technologies.
Six Chinese nationals and two Taiwanese nationals are also charged in the scheme and remain at large, according to the Justice Department.
In the second case, prosecutors allege that four North Korean nationals conspired to steal more than $900,000 in virtual currency from one company based in the US and another in Serbia. The North Koreans then laundered that money through foreign accounts, the department alleged. Those four people also remain at large.
For years, North Korean workers have used fraudulent identities and sometimes passed interview screenings to infiltrate American companies big and small. A previous CNN investigation found that the founder of a California-based cryptocurrency startup had unwittingly paid tens of thousands of dollars to a North Korean engineer. The entrepreneur was unaware of the situation until the FBI notified him, he said.
The schemes have touched other parts of American culture.
North Korean illustrators and graphic designers appear to have helped produce work for US animation studios unbeknownst to those companies, independent researchers told CNN last year. The researchers discovered a trove of cartoon sketches on an open computer server on the North Korean portion of the internet.
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