Written by Eric Tucker
Washington (AP) On Monday, the Justice Department filed criminal charges in relation to a plan by North Korea to use the wages of remote IT workers who were unknowingly hired by American businesses to finance its weapons program.
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Law enforcement officials described the accusations as part of a nationwide operation that also led to the confiscation of laptops, websites, and money accounts used to commit the fraud.
Two distinct cases One in Georgia and the other in Massachusetts mark the Justice Department’s most recent attempt to address a persistent threat that, according to officials, brings in a significant amount of money for the North Korean government and, in certain situations, gives employees access to private and confidential information from the companies that employ them.
With the help of stolen or falsified U.S. citizen identities, the North Korean government sends thousands of workers to work remotely as IT staff for Fortune 500 companies and other American businesses. Prosecutors claim that although the corporations are tricked into thinking that the employees they hired are situated in the United States, many of them are actually stationed in China or North Korea, and the money they get is transferred into accounts run by other North Korean-affiliated conspirators.
Assistant Attorney General John Eisenberg, the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said in a statement that these schemes target and steal from U.S. companies in order to circumvent sanctions and finance the North Korean regime’s illegal programs, including its weapons programs.
In a case made public in a federal court in Massachusetts on Monday, the Justice Department announced that it had charged over six Chinese and Taiwanese nationals and arrested one U.S. national for allegedly participating in a complex scam that impacted over 100 businesses and generated at least $5 million in revenue, according to prosecutors.
The defendants are charged with setting up shell firms with phony websites to give the impression that the employees were associated with respectable companies and opening bank accounts to accept the earnings. They also profited from the assistance of anonymous enablers in the US who allowed the workers to use computers remotely, deceiving employers into thinking the workers were logging in from US locations.
The Justice Department stated that some of the fraudulent employees were able to obtain and steal information pertaining to sensitive military technology, but it did not name the organizations that were defrauded.
Four North Korean nationals are accused in the Georgia case of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in virtual currency by posing as someone else in order to obtain access to a blockchain research and development company located in Atlanta.
In recent years, the Justice Department has launched an initiative to counter the threat and brought comparable prosecutions.
