North Korean's 100k fake IT workers net $500M a year for Kim
theregister.com105 points by speckx 4 hours ago
105 points by speckx 4 hours ago
I’m a little unclear on the usage of the word “fake” here.
Going by article, these are real people doing actual real work, they often use stolen identities to conceal information about themselves, and they get help from outside sources to do their jobs better.
Whatever the right word is, it’s not “fake”. Maybe fraudulent? Or ulterior motives? Or deceptive? Or pretext? Or threat actor? Or foreign agents?
I agree - this is closer to bonded labor though the paying employer doesn't know it. Instead most of their earnings go to their actual employer (which is the North Korean state). "slave" maybe is more appropriate? "prisoner"?
most of my earnings go to my employer too... we bill clients at X and I get a small portion of it
Exactly. As slave as them.
Not an apt metaphor because we can just walk away and never see our employers again if that’s our free will.
I know we're getting deep in the meta discussion but the free will that you're describing involves basically starving to death. Sure, you can walk away but unless you're well off, we all basically live in the same society that makes sure you are ALWAYS dependent on some kind of wage. You cannot live off the land, build housing, or eat food without some kind of income in the modern world. And thus the concept of wage slave.
But wage slavery, while bad, isn't slavery still. In slavery proper, the option of walking away straight up doesn't exist. In fact, in extreme cases, even the option of dying might not be available.
It is slavery. Chattel slavery is much more severe than what we normally consider slavery. Yet “slavery” and chattel slavery are both still slavery. The reason what you’re saying is so accepted is because we are currently living under a universal liberal world order that says wage slavery id freedom.
You’ll lose your health insurance
Sounds like having a w2 is a pretty good deal for you then.
Slavery isn’t defined by “I don’t want to talk away because the deal is too good”, it’s more like “I’m unable to walk away because I’m threatened with force if I do so”
My dad used to refer to that as the golden handcuffs when he worked for GE. Wouldn't compare it to slavery though, he just felt trapped there because nobody else would pay him that well or give him as good of benefits
The implication is that they're pretending to be legitimate employees whereas they are actually exfiltrating IP from a hostile nation state. Seems valid.
I believe that in this context they are referring to their fake personalities.
"Fake" seems fine. If I buy a fake watch, that might mean that it's a real watch that does its job of telling time, but it says "Rolex" on the front and that's a lie.
In that example it would be more common to describe the watch as a "fake Rolex", for the reason you give (it's a real watch).
I agree that fake is an odd word to describe this. Most likely much of our IT infrastructure is extremely compromised. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the major password/healthcare/etc... leaks in the past 6 years were the result of someone "accidentally" setting a cloud bucket to public.
I actually turned down a fly-to-texas for an in person interview about a year back, but I do think in the age of the internet if we don't sacrifice some of the things we have taken for granted in the past, we're going to lose our country. Perhaps there should be a law that requires a picture of any employee standing next to their boss for continued employment - at some point in the future. (this is just an idea, not to start a flamewar, don't attack the specific idea, but attack the idea of some kind of extra checking if you don't agree with it)
I don't think we have a word for this. At best, it is disingenuous work.
we have many words for this Con, Fraud, Secret, Poseur, Imposter .. and after googling for more terms "Pseudonymist" seem a better fit
Labeling the actual worker negatively seems harsh - they are probably being forced into it by the state. You might say they can willingly underperform and not be used this way - but if the alternative is a much harder life, could you blame them for playing along?
Who cares what they're called. Main concern in this case is that the result of their work poses danger to the US. Like a spies. They often do legit work and meanwhile some "extra"
It's North Korea though and they're all eViL. Imagine a world where the U.S lifted sanctions on N.K. traded with them and stopped crying about losing a war 70 years ago. Ah well a boy can dream.
Edit: Lol saying anything positive about North Korea on hacker news and people instantly freak out. This fucking website man. North Korea isn't what I would call a free society but it's also not the hell on earth that most liberals want you to think it is. So much of the misery that normal North Koreans have to face is because of western imposed sanctions. We've tried punishing them for 30 years now, it hasn't destroyed the regime if anything they double down. I guess it's easy for a bunch of overfed over paid tech workers to not feel any kind of solidarity for a North Korean though and insist on punishing them even more. Hell the North Korean government would even be open for this kind of agreement if we would actually guarantee their sovereignty, sadly trusting the United States of America to hold up any kind of deal you make with them is fucking impossible.
Here is a quote I came up with but is attributed to Henry Kissinger
Having the United States as your enemy is dangerous, but having them as your friend is fatal.
That old bag liked it so much he had no problem taking credit for it.
Lot's of people have tried trading with North Korea, but they're politically unreliable. China and Russia both try obviously, but so has South Korea. These cooperations usually work for a while but eventually the unreliable reality of the North Korean government wrecks it for them. If it were all America's fault, as these sort of regimes always claim, they'd be able to get on well enough with their neighbors, but they can't.
The United States plays a large role in destabilizing them I went to a lecture at my university where a South Korean professor said as much. He was hardly a fan of the North Korean regime. At this point the regime has zero interest in cooperation, I'm sorry but your government is slowly becoming an authoritarian state in its own right and is currently causing chaos at the behest of Israel a country which just commuted a genocide with the blessing of both parties in your country. Imagine trying to get along with your neighbor when they have billions of dollars of military hardware on your border. No country is to willing to cooperate with North Korea because being in the good graces of the United States is 100x more beneficial. You claim that North Korea can't get along with its neighbors please remind me which country invaded and artificialy divided Korea when they elected some one The United States didn't like.
Okay, let me remind you then.
Korea was divided by both United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union organized elections, rigging towards a rather unpopular figure, even within the national socialist circles, for their imperialist purposes.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but where did OP state was american? How is their nationality even relevant here? How is the american descent to authoritarianism, which is still far from a autocratic socialist regime (at least yet), relevant to NK being distrusted even by USA's opposition (i.e. China and Russia)?
ah yes, its Americas fault NK citizens are starving and cannot freely leave the country lmao what kind of weird cope are you talking about here
The US has fuck all to do with it. Vietnam whooped America's ass in a war which was far more socially significant for the American public (the Korean War is called the "Forgotten War" in America), still has their communist government, yet has normalized (relatively) relations with America and certainly the rest of the world and trades with everybody. North Korea is economically isolated because they refuse to be normal even by communist standards.
I don’t think you know what “communist standards” means.
> “North Korea is economically isolated because they refuse to be normal even by communist standards.”
“Kim is isolated because she refuses to be normal like the other submissive housewives beaten by their husbands”
You are blaming the victim while acting like the aggressor oppressors actions are not their own responsibility.
The US has been authoritarian for a long time. What else do you call a society that keeps on humming along while doing various genocides via a culturally embedded Monroe Doctrine mentality.
Sure, let's prop up a communist dictatorship so the leftists can run their concentration camps more efficiently.
Brilliant idea, comrade.
Even other communist dictatorships are pretty sick of North Korea's shit!
Wow so you guys don't have ideological brain worms at all. I can tell you guys have never studied international relations because you refuse to try an take North Koreas concerns seriously. Do I have to remind you that a South Korean attempted a fascist coup recently and that it was left wing organisations and trade unions that mobilised to stop him? Also which "communist dictators" are you talking about, and how do you know this? You do realise that the United States is also a one party state when it comes to foreign policy right?
If you love freedom so much shouldn't this be worrying more? https://www.npr.org/2025/04/22/nx-s1-5340753/trump-democracy...
For any one interested in learning a bit more about North Korea and how it got to be the country it is I'd suggest Noah Kulwins series Blowback.
> Do I have to remind you that a South Korean attempted a fascist coup recently and that it was left wing organisations and trade unions that mobilised to stop him?
Those "left wing organizations" encompass the majority of South Korea, almost 2/3 of the current parliament, and the current sitting government. And may I remind you that South Korea's current "leftist" president recently gifted Trump a golden crown to get favorable deals?
He's about as leftist as Joe Biden.
> Do I have to remind you that a South Korean attempted a fascist coup recently
By "fascist", I suppose you mean right-wing. Going by the average RW authoritarian dictatorship, that's still better than the documented NK conditions, specially given that most fall later.
> ...[...] and that it left wing organizations and trade unions that mobilized to stop him?
Nice cherry picking. Even Yoon's own party turned against him. But even ignoring the right wing here, said left wing organizations are also in opposition to NK.
> You do realize that the United States is a one party state when it comes to foreign policy right?
That sentence doesn't make sense. There's no such thing as "one party state foreign policy". The idea of a one party state is specifically about a state that is intolerant to any other ideas other than those accepted by the one true party. If you are referring to USA's aggressiveness, may I remind you that that switches between presidents.
> If you love freedom so much shouldn't this be worrying more?
Whataboutism.
Those scholars are blowhards. Trump is basically the same as any other time. As you state the US is unipolar in how it treats Others. Aka authoritarian.
Blowback was great I should finish that season.
Oh yeah you don’t know what you’re talking about haha. The west isn’t a dictatorship! Only the Others.
A friend of mine got two such "fake" candidates for a coding interview. His experience reminded me of those "Nigerian Prince" emails from 20 years ago. These two gentlemen had western names (like "Brandon Smith") but Asian features and a tenuous grasp of spoken English; even though they claimed to have undergrad degrees from US universities. And he could tell they were looking at another screen to copy code from. After just a few minutes he realized what was going on, but continued the interview just to get the experience.
Frankly sounds like many "real" candidates I've interviewed.
The tenuous grasp of spoken English despite a degree taught in English is also not unusual.
Setting aside the fraud for a moment (which is an insurmountable barrier to employeeing them).
To some extent I'd be satisfied if they actually had a degree and were productive. They obviously need good enough receptive and written English to work.
Especially if they are earning 5k per year as the title suggests.
The far more common fraud is:
1) Hire fake candidate
2) You realize they're fake 1-2 weeks into the role. They are unreliable. They don't show up for meetings. You have trouble communicating with them
3) You fire them
But they've already won the game. They collected a single paycheck. And for an intermediate (even junior) dev position, collecting even just a single paycheck is a big pay day for them.
The main cost to the company is time wasted, needing to open the role once more to find a real candidate who can actually do the job.
I think it's incredibly rare for these candidates to actually do the job well. (They also have fake resumes, all of their experience is made up -- so if you're expecting expertise, you're likely not going to get it)
Not just paycheck. They had access to some or all of your company's internal system, code, and data for the duration. That's a much bigger threat.
I wonder how achievable this would be with even a deepfake filter?
A single person does remote interviews all day. The person who turns up is just some body to run the scam.
That said, as the saying goes that's a lot of hard work, to avoid working hard.
This is a little baffling to me, if you're suggesting this is an actual method people employ to make a living. Interviewing is difficult and stressful. Or maybe their approach is a shotgun strategy, so they don't care?
If they're living in NK then maybe their alternatives for making a living are mostly much worse than this?
> Especially if they are earning 5k per year as the title suggests.
Not sure that's how the math goes. TFA mentions every employed worker has a team behind them, and is often successful in their job as a result.
Kinda fascinating. Here we are, usually dreaming about how one person could do multiple jobs. There they are, having multiple people do one job in the best (looking) way.
North Korea runs like a big organized crime family that specializes in forced labor human trafficking and drugs. I've read that they even operate overseas businesses that send slaves that aren't allowed to leave those businesses such as for timber harvesting in the Russian far east and various businesses in South East Asia.
The Latin American cartels operate almost like miniature North Koreas.
This is why JFK considered it so important for the US to end it's imperial tendencies.
It's like that 90's cocaine commercial. "Where'd you learn to do this?" "I learned it by watching you, allright?!"
The numbers in the headline seem odd. They imply that each (fake|fraudulent) worker only nets $5000 per year for Kim. I know the system has some inefficiencies where people behind the scenes are helping the "employee" with the work and there are cost of living expenses, taxes etc. but that seems like a pretty low take.
This might include people working in lumber camps in places like Siberia, "mercenaries" in Ukraine, people in NK-managed restaurants in China, Laos etc, or similar efforts that have been reported on, where the average revenue per worker is likely a lot lower.
I had the same thought - I guess there's additional overhead in paying the in-country proxy and probably also a lot of churn (being found out and fired, and then taking a long time to find another position).
5k a year could be 2 weeks of onboarding or waiting out a bureaucratic PIP process.
Its also possible that its a numbers game and only 2/3 succeed at getting hired.
It would be ironic if the DPRK just passes on more of the money than most contract software companies.
If anyone pays so much money to someone they never met, or _dependable_ know their identity, that seems like a major fail.
The whole idea that someone who couldn't legally enter the US, gets easier clearance than any tourist, or foreign academic with an opinion about the current gov that seems uncomfortable to them baffles me.
Not the first time some priorities seem out of touch with reality.
The point is that there are legit American citizens who are in on the con. They have real SSNs and an actual presence in the US. They run proxy servers out of their house to make it seem like that's where their web traffic is coming from. From the company's perspective, everything seems like a regular remote employee.
A proxy server can't fool an in-person interview. Totally bizarre how in-person interviews have fallen out of fashion, now that they're needed the most.
I actually have first hand experience with this! One person came for the on site interview, and a different and much worse person did the remote work once hired. This was over a decade ago now.
> The point is that there are legit American citizens who are in on the con...
For example - https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/arizona-woman-sentenced-17m-i...
And another one ironically by a Ukrainian national who is ethnic Ukrainian and not Donbas Russian - https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/ukrainian-national-senten...
Bloomberg made a good video about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gjnrMg9iSo
BuT They"Re sO cHeAp!
> It cites information from the US Government that these IT workers can earn more than $300,000 a year
Doesn't sound that cheap.
It's pretty impressive how far American salaries go in other countries. Between thousands of applications, if you manage to snag a single IT role with a larger corp you're potentially getting the local equivalent of dozens of people's regular income.
How are these IT workers fake? Sounds like they are really doing the job.
Reminds me of the Key & Peele sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM
> Once employed in a full-time role, fake workers are often very successful, since they sometimes have multiple people helping them to produce their work, with the hope of getting a promotion and gaining more privileged access to the IT systems.
I think the "fake" part is the long term play to get enough privilege to presumably perform a cybersecurity attack. But less "fake" and more "spy" from the description - the outlined scheme is literally what spies agencies do.
Came here to post this. I'm glad someone else thought of it. "Hear me out... we're going to rip of Western companies by... get this... writing code for them and taking home a paycheck week after week. They're just going to give us the money!!"
I would say they are "fake" because they work using stolen identities and hide their location. In order to receive these high wages they need to pretend to be located in US and they need to provide the paperwork showing they have a right to work there.
Well, it sounds like they are effectively slaves to the government, who is raking in their income on their behalf, and would presumably be able to "activate" them as an insider threat at some point.
Well, it is (highly) illegal for them to do this. So they presumably lie about everything, like name, location, ...
Perhaps fake is not the correct word, but the actual individuals are likely to have more than a few faked details. They do exist, of course.
It's also very dubious becuase, well, would you really hire a worker from an organization that also does things like hack hospitals and then hold systems hostage for bitcoin?
To be fair, "illegal" here doesn't matter. North Korea doesn't follow American law.
Obviously, when working you have to follow the law both in the country where you live and the country where you work. Even in the case of remote work. Sadly, even if you just consult. So you can be pretty sure: highly illegal.
Weird take on legality. They're working American jobs, breaking American law. Yes it matters.
I'm sure American law enforcement will get the chance to arrest them next time they set foot in the US. Or maybe DPKR will extradite them, who knows?
If we could prosecute and incarcerate them, how likely is it that a US prison is still an improvement over living in North Korea?
But are only North Koreans fake?
I got an offer to "lend" my resume/identity to an upwork profile for a couple hundred per ... week iirc. Or was it month?
It could have been NK but it could have also been any other country where that makes financial sense. Or someone running a bunch of "AI"s.
>Alternatively, there is a killer interview question, as reported by The Register previously: ask them something like "How fat is Kim Jong Un?" and if they are a North Korean, they will terminate the call instantly.
I wonder if they know that he is fat and are afraid to tell, or that it is strictly forbidden to answer these types of questions. I don't really believe this "hack" can work long term.
I’ve had the call terminate with such candidates after frankly stating that they are from North Korea and lying about everything. The person in front of the camera would try to maneuver out of it and then the call ended as if someone pulled the plug behind the scenes. I’ve built some pretty decent heuristics to identify them before wasting time on interviews.
Genuinely baffled by the logistics of this. The article makes it sound like these are large numbers of people in NK or surrounding countries who rely on Google translate, so not sophisticated spies or whatever.
Even if they get their hands on a fake American ID, these are taxable, insured jobs, they're not working at a restaurant under the table. IT companies ship out hardware, where are these people banked etc?
How does this practically look, officially you're working with Mark Johnson but you end up on a zoom call with a guy who speaks broken English and connects from the other part of the world and you're not suspicious?
old article but still relevant. some things don't change
So $5,000 per? That's nothing at all. They could make a lot more by doing other things.
In North Korea that's likely a lot of money. They probably get paid a lot less than that and Kim pockets the rest.
It's evident starting in 2017-2018 with the surge of the price of crypto and the rise of WFH with COVID, North Korea pivoted from rockets to much more lucrative and safer cyber theft to enrich its leadership and attack the West. A success. Policy makers don't care.
Camera cuts to a tech bro at his desk with 3 jobs and 5 instances of Claude Code running:
> I had [the Register] explain to me three times what [Kim] got arrested for because it sounds an awful lot like what I do here every day.
How is it that corporations can't get their act together wrt sensible hiring of remote workers? Before giving someone a final offer letter, why is it so difficult to meet them once (somewhere outside of North Korea and China)? The cost is negligible compared to a large salary.
What corporations actually do for verification also is equally damning. They ask for references, which no coworker really has an obligation to give, and it comes in the way of independent thought. Meanwhile, those from North Korea will sail through this blocker by having their fellow countrymen serve as references.
I mean, if the North Korean employees are doing good work, the companies employing them aren't exactly incentivized to find out that they're really North Koreans, cuz then they have an obligation to fire their actually productive employee.
Huh. The onus is to do the personal verification during the interview and offer process. It doesn't make any sense to do it once the employee has already been onboarded, although it makes sense to visually ensure from time to time that they're still the same person that was interviewed.
>why is it so difficult to meet them once (somewhere outside of North Korea and China)? The cost is negligible compared to a large salary.
It wouldn't matter. They'd hire some actor to do it. If you insist that they take precautions to be sure the person in the video interview looks like the guy they meet, they'll do that too... but the one doing the work will do so remotely from Pyongyang. There might be technology fixes for this, but they almost certainly involve isolating the United States' internet from most of the rest of the world.
Yes, but it makes it a bit harder. Every verification step lowers the risk, if only a little bit. It does matter that much.
I'm so tired of this intellectually dishonest phrasing of making everything about "controversial" individuals whenever they're perceived as being the current villain, whether that's Putin, Elon, Kim or whatever.
Just terrible writing.
They aren't just perceived as being the villain; they are the villain. They will copy your corporate data and exploit it in multiple ways. They will steal your corporate funds. As an aside, they also do significant cryptocurrency theft.
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Actual atomic weapons not just stockpile, hundreds stave to death there daily, and everyone knows the famous satellite view of the entire country in darkness at night (while his palace is lit)
Yet no oil so they will be one of the longest surviving tyrannies in history
We can bet every country like them now will be building massive war drone factories too
Seeing what China next door has done with solar and batteries, I wonder if they'll do an electric end-run around oil, similarly to some places in Africa.
It's not the lack of oil that enabled this. The west* fought a bloody war to defeat North Korea. We just didn't win (though we did prevent the north from taking the south...). Now you've got a dictatorship protected by their ability to deal devastating damage to South Korea via nukes, huge stockpiles of conventional artillery (and Seoul is within range), etc. Moreover one backed by a superpower (China, and before China the soviet union... indeed these countries are the reason the west didn't win the first war as well).
They could have all the oil in the world and we'd be no more in a position to do anything about it.
*US, Uk, Australia, Netherlands, Canada, France, New Zealand, Phillipines, Tukey, Thailand, South Africa, Greece, Belgum, Luxembourg, Ethopia, Columbia, and South Korea.
South Korea wouldn't exist as a prosperous Western-aligned liberal democracy without the war, so it was hardly a complete loss.
> South Korea wouldn't exist as a prosperous Western-aligned liberal democracy without the war
The first several decades after the war they were very much not a liberal democracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Democratic_Struggle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Republic_of_Korea).
We didn't win because China intervened in massive numbers to keep the regime in the North from losing the whole country.
The US did not win because the US did not win. Crying about the reasons does not help. Usual FAFO. Does not hurt to think of consequences before starting something
South Korea and its allies did not win - but they did successfully defeat the North Korean invasion of South Korea that started the war. Resulting in 53 million people today who live good lives in a high tech liberal democracy instead of living in abject poverty under the dictatorship that controls the north.
Despite not winning, the consequences of the western nations going to war in this case appear to have been significantly positive. It's really the only war since WWII that I think I can confidently say that about.
No need for political lecture. This was a simple point of win / win not.
>"high tech liberal democracy"
After US involvement South Korea was anything but. It is only since 1987 that some semblance of normalcy had started to appear. Still it is a country practically owned by Chaebols and Hell Joseon work and life culture. Recent temporary martial law with the president's shenanigans does not inspire much confidence either. Call it whatever you want.
When you imply there was "fucking around and finding out", "starting something", and "[negative] consequences" to a war that had positive consequences, and which was a war the other side started, there absolutely is a need to correct that.
Edit: Just noting that at the time I responded the above post consisted entirely of "No need for political lecture. This was a simple point of win / win not". The rest was edited in after the fact.
Yes I edited it later to respond you your point of flourishing society. I should have put it under PS or edited. My fault. The original point still stands.
Edited.
I do understand that comparatively to North Korea SK is of course a huge win for people. However I think they would like to compare their lives with something better than one of the world's poverty and people's abuse champion
> hundreds stave to death there daily
Yeah, you will need a solid source for that.
This isn't the 1990s, while malnutrition may happen, and there have been occasional shortages (covid was one example), it's unlikely people are starving to death in 2026, let alone multiple, let alone per day.
On top of that: North Korea is not that isolated as people think. North Koreans have smartphones and plenty of those living near the chinese border have chinese sim cards. Ever wondered why defectors say they regularly phone their family? Because virtually every north korean knows somebody with a chinese phone.
Of course flow of information outside is still tightly controlled and such, but there's zero direct evidence for starvation happening.
what a weird argument just to argue
you really have to ignore international news for years to argue starvation in North Korea isn't real
keep BBC News on in the background each morning and you'll learn stuff never mentioned anywhere on US news
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65881803
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/04/12/north-koreas-leader-warn...
it's been going on for decades and yes even though 2026