FBI says North Korea deployed thousands of IT workers to get remote jobs in US with fake IDs

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 340 points – FBI says North Korea deployed thousands of IT workers to get remote jobs in US with fake IDs
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FBI says North Korea deployed thousands of IT workers to get remote jobs in US with fake IDs::North Koreans are using fake IDs and learning IT skills to sneak their way into remote American jobs, according to the FBI and Justice departments.

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North Koreans are using fake IDs and learning IT skills to sneak their way into remote American jobs, according to the FBI and Justice departments.

CEOs on Monday be like: "Okay we need everyone to return to the office full time... It's for national security."

Does no-one check the damn IDs, ffs? It's a simple matter of typing some numbers into a computer.

I don't know about the U.S. but in the UK where I'm from, "illegally hiring a non-UK citizen" would be a criminal offence for the hiring company. How are they going to tax them?

A good chunk of the American economy is dependent on companies not checking the legal status of employees.

I get cash jobs like manual labor / agriculture, but where are these companies depositing these paychecks?

Another good way to fuck over the legitimate workers

From the summary posted below, it seems the US companies are outsourcing to China and Russia, and North Koreans living in those countries are getting these jobs. I'm guessing a part of whatever they send home is being taken, probably without their consent, by the NK government for weapon manufacturing.

It would be hard for a US company to verify if a document presented as a Chinese or Russian ID is actually from those countries or a forgery. You could ask for a passport, but they could always say they don't have one.

Holy smokes!! Part of their taxes are invested in their military industrial complex???

MADNESS!!

Are they just talking about taxes? I was thinking the NK government might be asking the workers for some 'voluntary' donations. If it is just the government taxing them and part of the tax revenue going towards the military then it doesn't seem like anything illegal is happening. Well, apart from the faking IDs part, but a bunch of poor people faking IDs to get jobs is a much much smaller issue than the NK government faking IDs to fund nukes.

Every time I see a comment about North Korea, I recommend watching "The Haircut" by BoyBoy. You can find it on YouTube. It's just 20 minutes long and it's quite entertaining to watch.

There's a nice part on the video about the "Prison Camps" and "Death Squads" which are applicable to "voluntary donations" as well. It also applies to the "poor people of NK" as well.

Wouldn't the ID need to be associated with a verifiable green card? (Again, not an expert in US employment)

Only if they worked physically in the US. these people work offshore for US companies.

Who pays them?

I'm guessing here but based on how I've done international contracts... The US-based company pays the not us-based company, and that not US-based company pays the employees. The not US-based company is responsible for ensuring that the employee can legally work in the country that they are physically in. And since that country is not America, they don't need an American green card.

All perfectly legal (unless sanctions forbid it).

But in that case they wouldn't need any fake IDs.

feels like an austin powers discarded skit... achieving world dominance by pretending to be mike from accounting who does excel like really good

US companies should not be able to outsource labor overseas.

According to the article, the companies didn't know that's what they were doing in this case. They thought they were hiring people living in the US:

Greenberg said the workers used various techniques to make it look like they were working in the US, including paying Americans to use their home Wi-Fi connections.

Ok, just so we're clear... The entire "scheme" was to get jobs working remotely in the US. And then doing those jobs adequately, and collecting a paycheck?

Truly deprived... I hope they catch every one of these monsters.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Thousands of information technology workers contracting with US companies have for years secretly sent millions of dollars of their wages to North Korea for use in its ballistic missile program, FBI and Department of Justice officials said.

Court documents allege that the government of North Korea dispatched thousands of skilled IT workers to live primarily in China and Russia with the goal of deceiving businesses from the US and elsewhere into hiring them as freelance remote employees.

The Justice Department in recent years has sought to expose and disrupt a broad variety of criminal schemes aimed at bolstering the North Korean regime, including its nuclear weapons program.

Two years ago, the Justice Department charged three North Korean computer programmers and members of the government's military intelligence agency with a broad range of global hacks that officials say were carried out at the behest of the regime.

Law enforcement officials said at the time that the prosecution highlighted the profit-driven motive behind North Korea's criminal hacking, a contrast from other adversarial nations like Russia, China, and Iran that are generally more interested in espionage, intellectual property theft or even disrupting democracy.

The panel of experts said in a report that the hackers used increasingly sophisticated techniques to gain access to digital networks involved in cyber finance and to steal information that could be useful in North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile programs from governments, individuals, and companies.

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