Bob McMillan
Appearances
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
talks about the smoothies she's eating.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
And what the scam is called is laptop farming.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
She's facilitating a multi-million dollar fraud that's designed to bring money into the heavily sanctioned North Korean regime.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
And she talks about food accountability.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
I mean, she had worked as a waitress, as a massage therapist, and right around 2019, she decided to sort of reinvent herself in the era of the gig economy. She went to a tech boot camp and got some web development skills, but it wasn't paying out, right? Like, she was living in a small town north of Minneapolis, basically in a trailer.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
The message comes via LinkedIn. And it says we're a foreign company looking for a U.S. representative. That's really all we know about the message.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
It's almost always a tech job, right? So it's quite often coding.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
Yeah, they do, you know. Like, I've heard stories of these, some North Koreans, they just kind of, they get hired, they log into a couple of meetings, they never say anything, and then they're quickly fired, right? And then some apparently last for years.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
This is sort of their latest hustle, and it's a pretty lucrative one. The FBI estimates they make hundreds of millions of dollars a year from this. But the other problem is that they also steal data, and they extort their employers.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
Well, I mean, whatever they can get their hands on.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
There's one cybersecurity company, I don't know who it is, but they apparently hired nine workers that turned out to be North Koreans.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
Yeah, imagine getting it. Richard, what are you looking for in terms of challenges with this job?
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
She talks about Japanese boy bands. And I'm wearing my shirt.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
They'll just hire some random person to show up at the company, pretend to be the worker whose identity they've stolen, and collect their laptop or collect a badge. They will hire people to receive packages to reship things if they need somebody to be in a certain state or something like that. The companies have these controls to make sure that the people that they're hiring are legitimate.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
And the North Koreans are just remarkably creative in just hiring somebody to solve any kind of control you have.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
Yeah, it's like the heart and soul of it all, right? Because corporations don't react well to employees logging in from North Korea. You need to look like you're connecting to the corporate internet from America.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
And every now and then, she'll slip in something about maybe a renaissance fair. You know, just the kind of things that people want to watch TikTok videos about.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
Christina receives the laptops that these remote workers get issued as part of their jobs. And she sets them all up and makes them all run from her room.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
Christina Chapman did a lot of things for her clients that were crucial to the whole fraud. And she kind of operated like a staffing agency for illegal workers.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
She's basically responding to all the requests that are coming into all these North Korean workers to just making sure they get through the HR onboarding. When you get hired, you got to fill out, you know, W-2s. So much paperwork. You got to provide a proof that you can work in the United States.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
You have to install some sort of remote access tool on the laptop so that the North Koreans can connect to it and pretend to be working from that laptop. And, you know, sometimes she seemed a bit worn out from all the... She talks about the demands of her clients, how demanding they were.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
Well, she made... OK, money, you know, not like crazy amounts of money. I mean, according to the Fed, she brought in in the paychecks that were paid to the fake workers that work through her laptop farm amounted to more than 17 million dollars.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
And she made a percent of that in fees.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
This one video really stood out to me. She's in her backyard. She's unboxing this Carla Rockmore jewelry.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
You know, and she's so excited. And she, at one point, she says, I've never purchased jewelry with care instructions before.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
And she talks about how she wants to bid for the queen's seat there, and that's the cushioned seat, and then she gets it.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
Yeah, I mean, she was showering in her gym, you know, a couple years earlier, and now she's got the queen seat at Drunken Shakespeare.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
The FBI knocks on her door, and they seize all these laptops. They seize 90 devices from her house. And, you know, that's the end of it.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
Well, there's no evidence to show that she knew she was working with the North Koreans, but there's excerpts of her chats that are included in charging documents. It's pretty clear she knew she was doing something illegal. She talks about the illegality of, you know, signing federal forms and forging signatures and things like that.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
At one point, she does DoorDash in Phoenix and makes like $7.25 for the night. She tries to sell coloring books. She tries GoFundMes. She just tries anything she can to kind of keep herself housed.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
You know, it's funny. I interviewed the CSO of Amazon a couple of weeks ago, and he was aware of this problem. And I said, what do you do about it? And he said, bring your employees in five days a week.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
What's really interesting to me is that it's not shot in her kitchen. It's shot in her spare room, but the racks on the wall of the room, no pictures or anything, just these racks. And on the racks are laptop computers. I counted at least 10 laptop computers with different colored sticky notes on them. And the computers are whirring away in the background there as she
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
I mean, you got to meet them face to face. Like, you got to bring them in. This is a huge problem. Like, there's no driver's license for the Internet, right? And it is basically impossible to really know that you are... meeting somebody who is who they claim to be, right?
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
So if you deal with financial institutions or the government, they have all these systems to sort of establish... Security questions, two-factor... Security questions, all this stuff. And what the North Koreans have shown with this laptop farming phenomenon is a big part of it can be circumvented by just hiring somebody through a gig economy website to cheat it.
The Journal.
The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
criminals are just able to pretend to be anyone they want.
WSJ What’s News
Elon Musk Leaves DOGE, but Will Keep Advising Trump
Es gibt drei Dinge, die sie wollen. Zuerst und vor allem wollen sie Geld. Sein Regime ist versichert. Sie haben einen schwierigen Zeitraum, mit jemandem im Westen zu handeln. Und sie brauchen Geld. Sie brauchen Geld für ihr Waffenprogramm, zum Beispiel.
WSJ What’s News
Elon Musk Leaves DOGE, but Will Keep Advising Trump
Und die FBI schlägt fest, dass sie hunderttausende Millionen Dollar pro Jahr verdienen, nur aus Waren, von Firmen, die diese Nordkoreaner hirten, die, zum einen sind sie schlechte Arbeiter und zum anderen sind sie nicht schlecht, zum anderen sind sie in den letzten Monaten oder sogar Jahren bei diesen Firmen. Und so haben sie einen Hack gefunden, in der Situation, in der wir jetzt remote arbeiten.
WSJ What’s News
Elon Musk Leaves DOGE, but Will Keep Advising Trump
Also das ist das erste, was sie wollen, ist Geld. Das zweite ist, dass sie mehr Geld wollen. Also ganz oft werden sie Daten ausfiltrieren, sie werden deine korporatischen Geheimnisse, deinen Sourcencode, deine Kundeninformationen stehlen. And then they will threaten to dump it once you fire them. And so they'll extort you. So that's number two.
WSJ What’s News
Elon Musk Leaves DOGE, but Will Keep Advising Trump
And then the third case is murky, but the FBI suspects that they are also conducting espionage. So they've hit aerospace companies. There are certain types of companies that might have secrets that the North Korean regime would be interested in. So those are the three things they're doing.