North Korea has been sending young, tech-savvy operatives to pose as ordinary American job seekers. Tech reporter Bobbie Johnson investigates the scam. This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Further reading: North Korea stole your job by Bobbie Johnson. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Photo of North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un by Contributor/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What challenges do companies face when hiring remote workers?
One of the big challenges of hiring remote workers is you don't really know who you're hiring. Recently, the FBI warned that many companies really don't know who they're hiring. Big American companies like Google and SentinelOne have been tricked by compelling resumes and LinkedIn profiles into hiring North Koreans.
Chapter 2: How is North Korea involved in cyber espionage?
Now to the story of spies in the break room. The US, the UK and South Korea have jointly accused North Korea of using a cyber espionage group to steal sensitive and classified data.
Ahead on Today Explained, we talked to a reporter about what it's like to sit in on a job interview with a North Korean operative.
Chapter 3: What happens during a job interview with a North Korean operative?
We tried to keep it as sort of simple as possible. So I was just introduced as someone who was sitting on the call. We didn't want to alert them to obviously the fact that I was a journalist, because we didn't want to scare them away. We wanted to see what they had to say.
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It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. The life of a freelance investigative reporter is not an easy one. A lot of time is spent figuring out what story is going to justify your time and talents. Such was the problem for reporter Bobby Johnson, who's based in the Bay Area. Late last year, Bobby had been hearing about people using AI to run scams, and he decided to see if there was anything there.
And so one evening, I bumped into this young entrepreneur called Simon Weikmans at an event in San Francisco. And I shared with him what I'd heard about and asked if he'd heard about anything. And he said, well, you'll never guess what happened to me recently.
It turned out that Simon runs a web security company, and he'd been interviewing people for a software engineering job, a remote software engineering job, so people not based near HQ. And In interviewing, he'd seen a bunch of deeply suspicious activity. You know, he was worried that people were trying to fraudulently get jobs or something.
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Chapter 4: How did Bobbie Johnson uncover the North Korean scam?
And it turned out to be far more complicated and weirder than we expected. So what Simon spotted in the first place was that the job was bombarded with candidates, right? So there were hundreds of applications, way more than was typical. Then he started getting on video interviews with people and strange things kept coming up.
Lots of the applicants had resumes that didn't really match what he saw on screen. You know, maybe they had Anglo names, but were ethnically Asian. A lot of them said they were born and raised in America, in Tennessee or in Brooklyn, but they had really, really thick foreign accents.
They all aced their coding tests in almost exactly the same ways, but when he was talking with them they often gave stilted answers and asked questions just about salary but nothing else. And there were other things too, so they all used similar default video background images.
They had laggy internet connections and in the background he could hear noise, so it sounded like they were in a busy room, not a call, like a call centre maybe, not what you would normally do a job interview in. So these things, you know, individually, he didn't see any of these as a major red flag because you can imagine why somebody's name doesn't fit their face in your conception, right?
Or why they have an accent or why they use a default background on their video call. But as he spotted candidate after candidate, following the same pattern, he started to get really suspicious of them. And then the clincher really was that he saw one of the candidates was wearing glasses and as the candidate was answering questions, Simon could see in the lenses of the glasses a reflection
of an AI bot on the candidate's screen. So what he could see was that this was pumping out a script of some kind for the applicant to read in order to answer Simon's questions. And he could see this happening in real time. So at this point he figured his paranoia was well justified.
What emerged as we got deeper and deeper in were not just that these were people who were trying to fraudulently get jobs or people who were maybe running several different jobs at the same time, which we've seen a lot since the pandemic. But in fact, we were able to connect them back and see that they were
actually operatives who are working for the North Korean regime to try and get jobs and send money back to North Korea, which is, it turns out, this kind of pretty widespread scam that's being perpetrated against American companies particularly, but all around the world.
So by the time you met Simon at that event, he had clearly copped on that something was up here. Had Simon actually hired anyone in North Korea?
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Chapter 5: What tactics do North Korean operatives use to get jobs?
So they work with an accomplice who manages the physical stuff. So they're based in the US and they will install software that lets the North Koreans dial into their computer from overseas. and still look like they're in New Jersey or California or wherever they say they're based.
So this means you have these middlemen who have houses full of laptops that all connect up to all the different jobs that they're working. And law enforcement calls that a laptop farm.
And the accomplice gets up every morning, switches the computers on, makes sure they're all running properly, lets the North Koreans dial in to those computers from overseas, and then carry on the job and carry on the subterfuge. And in some cases, the facilitators who have been caught have been found with like 50 or 60 laptops running simultaneously in their house.
And that's the place where law enforcement is actually able to catch these gangs, understand what's going on and try to stop it. So there's one case particularly that I dug into, which is of a middle man or middle woman in this case called Christina Chapman, who recently pled guilty to a range of different crimes related to this.
Hey, lovelies. It's me. So today I am not being too experimental. I found something called avocado fries.
She was based in Minnesota and Arizona. And over the space of a couple of years, she worked with a North Korean team and helped them target at least 300 different companies in the US, including some pretty substantial ones.
Howdy, people. So today, I think, is day seven, and I did not make my own breakfast this morning.
My clients are going crazy, so I just... Some of them were mom-and-pop shops, but some were big corporations, yeah, and Chapman... ran this scam, she would help the teams do their IT work, she would host a laptop farm with maybe 60 computers at the same time, and she would help them dial into meetings or keep up to date with stuff.
She would receive money that she would then pass along to a bank in China and take a cut along the way.
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Chapter 6: Who is Christina Chapman and how is she connected to the scam?
North Korea threatening to test still more weapons of mass destruction after a beaming Kim Jong-un watched the latest missile launch.
But unlike his father, who was very kind of anti-technology and pretty old school, Kim Jong-un was actually educated in Switzerland under a pseudonym. He was kind of sent to school there and he had access to Western culture and Western technology. And when he took over in the 2010s as supreme leader, he really switched things around.
So North Korea went from a country that basically had like one pipeline to connect to the internet for years and years and years,
to a country that saw that maybe its only options or some of its options involved getting really good at technology and so he has encouraged and put more money and effort into funding computer science programs and technology literacy in North Korean schools and that's bubbled up through various universities and colleges that
sort of develop people's skills and teach them things you know they don't just teach them coding or how to use computers they teach them how to hack and how to cover their tracks and all of this stuff and so you get these young men particularly coming out of college in north korea who have been trained for the last few years to really be operatives you know to be pop make it possible for them to do this stuff
and it's paying dividends for North Korea you know for such a small country and one that doesn't have like a big technology industry they are they punch way above their weight in terms of this stuff and so there's a lot of cryptocurrency theft going on earlier this year a couple of months ago a crypto exchange in Dubai got hacked and $1.5 billion got stolen, and that was by North Korean hackers.
So these guys have realized that this is a very lucrative way with very low cost to them. Really, it's just a computer and some training to get out there and cause havoc and fund the country that has no other way of making money.
Do we know how much money this is making?
you know, typically a team of pretenders might earn, you know, several million dollars a year through the different jobs that they're running. And I've seen lots of estimates wild all over the place, but the minimum is kind of around $3 million a year. Now this is like, that's a lot of money, but it's not, you know, that's not a huge amount, but yeah, obviously the way North Korea operates,
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Chapter 7: What impact does this scam have on American companies?
The real problem underneath all of this is that the political or economic solutions that you think would be possible just aren't really effective, right? You can't enact sanctions against North Korea for this because The sanctions already enacted against North Korea are so punitive.
One of the reasons that these guys are doing this in the first place is because legal trade is basically zero because the country is being punished rightly for its rogue nuclear weapons program. So for now, from the industry and law enforcement folks I spoke to, your best remedy is to try and be aware of it and prevent it. happening to you. And that's tough.
And it's a big leap to go from saying, you know, there's something fishy going on with this applicant to, I believe this applicant may be working for the North Korean government. That's like, that's a wild jump to make. But at least if you're looking for things, looking for those red flags, or kind of looking for that circumstantial evidence, then you can protect yourself from from being a victim.
There is something about all of this, Bobby, that is just not particularly clever. It's working, but you don't have to have a beautiful mind to think up a scam like this one. I wonder, though, as you were reporting out this story, where your mind went when you thought about... What are the perils in the future that we're facing?
What doors are opened by this little scam that five years from now or 10 years from now might be even harder to combat?
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Chapter 8: How does law enforcement attempt to stop these scams?
That I think is the most fascinating question in all of this. There are sort of two threads that I would pull here. One is that once they can get access, they're stepping stones, right? They're just trying to do a job and earn money. But what if somebody else can use the same techniques and be more aggressive in their attacks?
If you get hired, let's say you get hired inside a government defense contractor, can you access intellectual property or state secrets or something like that? The espionage potential is high and the kind of aggressive attacks on people companies could get a lot worse. And then I think the second thread is just that it dramatically undermines trust in everything, right?
We already see deep fakes, we already see misinformation, we already see all kinds of ways of of making you not believe the things that you see. And if you can't even believe... Sorry, my computer screen just disappeared. I think it went on screensaver. I'm going to pick that one up again.
It's North Korea, okay.
Yeah, I do get paranoid about these things sometimes now. Yeah, I think there is this fundamental problem of eroding trust that you can't believe what your eyes are seeing. You know, we see deep fakes happening all the time, we see misinformation, we see all these systems working to kind of separate you from reality and try and get you to second guess everything that you see. And that's important.
You know, you don't want to fall for tricks, but the more prevalent they become, the more difficult it is to know what's real and what's not. And so if you are stuck in a position where you can't be 100% sure that the person on your company team phone call or Zoom call who doesn't like to put their camera on and doesn't talk very often, but they do their job.
If you start to believe that that person could be an operative of a foreign country, then you're getting really into some wild places in your thought process. And I think that undermining of reality is kind of the biggest existential problem here. And it's one, I don't know that there's a way to solve it, but we can all see how dangerous it can be to separate you from the truth.
Bobby Johnson, investigative reporter. Gabrielle Burbey produced today's show. Amina El-Sadi edited. Patrick Boyd is our engineer. And Laura Bullard checks the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.
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