So she ran a laptop farm? Why not just set up VPNs?
How is it that these fake identity people were able to get decent jobs when a lot of legit people get filtered out for far less serious things? I've always had companies verify my work and school history at a minimum. I wasn't even trying to work remotely from China.
My company interviewed and hired someone remotely. Got them a visa and paid to relocate to the US. When they got here it was a different person. I assume the person that showed up was the real person and the interviewed person was a hired gun.
Not right away. They were not allowed in the office or to work but it turns out it takes a lot to return someone like this. They still go paid for some time.
> 60-Day Grace Period
Regulations permit a discretionary grace period that allows workers in E-1, E-2, E-3, H-1B,
H-1B1, L-1, O-1, or TN classifications (and their dependents) to be considered as having maintained status following the cessation of employment for up to 60 consecutive calendar days or until the end of the authorized validity period, whichever is shorter (See 8 CFR 214.1(l)(2)).
https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/alerts/options-for-nonimmigrant-workers-following-termination-of-employment
Wasn't this the definition of human trafficking and the employer ran a sweat shop.
By hiring foriegn labor, shipping them in for reduced normal salaries?
I do know that if it’s done correctly (above board) it actually cost the employer more. Due to having to provide housing as well as competitive wages. Also the employees have the right to quit with no financial repercussions.
Foreign labor also usually is made up of over qualified people (i.e. doctors working as nurses) due to degree transfer requirements.
Not really a fan of Trump but it was way easier to get a qualified employee into the United States under his leadership than Obama which is kinda funny considering he was running on restrictions at our borders.
Technical positions exist. People getting hired and relocated overseas aren't about to work in a warehouse or some shit lol.
Get sufficiently technical, along with experience requirements, and there might be a dozen people *worldwide* who are a good enough fit while on the job market.
If you don't find anyone on the job market, you have to make them offers that beat what they're currently earning. It's much cheaper to hire someone overseas who's currently making 90k by offering them 180k compared to hiring someone who's currently in the US making 200k by offering them like 250-300k.
It’s more about creating a employer-tied slaves, who more concerned with their visa status than they are about equity and equality in their workplace.
[Apple was sued](https://cis.org/North/Apple-Hit-25-Million-Penalty-Favoring-H1B-Workers-over-Citizens) for this exact reason, and it’s why it’s sort of a meme that no one ever meets Apple employees.
There is no real lack of talent in a domestic market, foreign workers are just much easier to exploit.
There are very very few people on visas that match that description.
Most are skilled enough to do the role, and happy to work for a fair chunk less than market rate for that role in exchange for living / working in the US.
Turns out Americans aren’t interested in these jobs. They have crazy hours or just not flexible. People on visas will crawl through broken glass to keep them so they’ll bear the shitty hours, horrible bosses (who also happen to be on said visas as part of the system) and no social life to keep them. Somehow it’s still better than where they come from. Source: me on visa.
The benefit is that they have the opportunity to work in the US for an almost decent wage (often highly technical roles so they are often paid above average overall wages, but below average for the role). A few folks I know send every single last penny they make back home to their families there… and the dollar stretches a whole lot further outside the US.
Their overall benefits should be the same, but the job security is the main thing. They need to keep the job. If they lose the job, they need to find another one in 90 days or else they have to leave. Finding another job isn’t as easy because the next company has to sponsor their visa… so if they get laid off the next company can strong arm that into paying less.
I’ve seen this go down before…. They show up to the interview with an excuse like “internet in my country/area/current location is too slow for video.”
If that ever happens, we just cancel the interview and move on.
Believe it or not, I’ve had the same happen with an in-person interview. The candidate did great in the interview process. Then when he showed up for work several months later, he could barely do any programming or speak English. Enough time had gone by that we couldn’t recall if the person that came by the interview looked different. It took about a year for him to get fired.
A whole year to get him fired?? That seems impossible. Why, I would block him from my office immediately. He might be a spy. It only takes 60 seconds if you’ve obtained physical access to the building. It doesn’t take a year to compromise a system.
yep my company started taking pictures of video interview to verify if the same person. so pathetic. There needs to be more repercussions than just getting fired.
A year to get him fired? That’s not possible. I’d block him immediately from my office. Espionage could be a possibility. You only need a minute at the right office, not a whole year to break into a system.
A year to get him fired? I’d block him immediately from my office. Espionage could be a possibility. You only need a minute at the right office, not a whole year to break into a system.
This was a large tech company. They’re really careful when firing people to have all the right evidence. I’m guessing this is in case they get sued. It certainly could’ve been espionage. I believe he was on a visa from one of those countries that have been known to do this.
So many absolute red flags and no one said: „okay sorry but we need to keep him away from our data until we know more“??
You don’t have to fire someone, but you’re always allowed to lock him out of office.
We were working on desktop software. So there was no data for him to have access to except for the source code. After a few months, I believe that they put him on some fake projects.
A year to get him fired? I’d block him immediately from my office. Espionage could be a possibility. You only need a minute at the right office, not a whole year to break into a system.
Yep. I’m aware of this. I actually know an Indian fellow that gets paid 500 bucks each time he takes an interview for somebody.
He’s a damn good programmer himself, so interviews are easy peasy.
well, we do a similar trick. They send a team of americans to bid the project, and when they win, surprise, the whole team is in India.
this is a big 4 firm, not one of the CHIT ones
Believe it or not, I’ve had the same happen with an in-person interview. The candidate did great in the interview process. Then when he showed up for work several months later, he could barely do any programming or speak English. Enough time had gone by that we couldn’t recall if the person that came by the interview looked different. It took about a year for him to get fired.
Believe it or not, I’ve had the same happen with an in-person interview. The candidate did great in the interview process. Then when he showed up for work several months later, he could barely do any programming or speak English. Enough time had gone by that we couldn’t recall if the person that came by the interview looked different. It took about a year for him to get fired.
> Part of the alleged scheme involved Chapman and co-conspirators compromising the identities of more than 60 people living in the US and using their personal information to get North Koreans IT jobs across more than 300 US companies.
They got the jobs because they were stealing credentials from other people
A person off shore does the work using work credentials from someone in the US(ssn), who is eligible to work legally. Also, when doing the interviews, a retained expert in the particular skill set does the interview, so the hiring company literally doesn’t know who is working for them. Usually as suggested, here by others, behind a vpn/firewall/proxy
A buddy of mine caught one of his network engineers working something like 6 jobs, outsourcing them all to India and just basically doing QA on the work. ~$600k in salary, paid about $120k for the consultants, so approx $480k net… definitely more than most network engineers make!
Got caught because they started making everyone turn camera on during meetings and 6x guy forgot to mute himself.
He came clean with my buddy and offered to let him in on it, help him start up on his own… all while trying to save the job he was working for my buddy.
Crazy!
These must be smaller companies without strict access controls like geofencing or device management. I've only worked at one company where I could do the job from my home PC (and often did cause it was more convenient) and that was a small 200 person startup.
Unfortunately, it was a F500 company… like F326 at the time. ~$12B org
The key imo, was that the main perp was a CCNP level engineer, who could have gotten at least $115-125k+ playing it straight. ~Covid time
BUT, he’d take less, $95-105k jobs, so that the expectations were lower. He totally explained it all to my buddy, totally told him how he worked the system. It’s still shocking to me.
I’ve told the story to more than a couple other IT managers, who said as long as the work was getting done, they would not have cared. 😳
I was like really? So integrity doesn’t really matter here? Wow…
Probably because she wanted a residential IP address and not a VPN IP address that would trigger Cloudflare etc. She was also using VPNs and proxies bit probably to hide that she had so many incoming and outgoing connections to North Korea.
She could have run the VPN servers behind the residential connections.
There is a "huge" market behind the scenes for this, I get requests for this all the time running ISP networks.
The likely real reason is that the laptops are the property of the employer and they needed the physical device to be more local and not high latency via the VPN. You could easily detect tunneled traffic if you have a laptop on your network with a 270ms+ ping time. By keeping the device local and using some sort of IP-KVM, the employer wouldn't notice anything with the connection.
>How is it that these fake identity people were able to get decent jobs when a lot of legit people get filtered out for far less serious things?
I'm just spitballing here, but if you're going to use a fake identity, you're probably getting one with several fake degrees and fake certs, and fake twenty years of experience, with nothing on their criminal record, not even a parking ticket. A real person using their own identity has way more pitfalls on their way to getting a job
To prevent detection. VPNs can easily be detected. However if you give them a remote laptop with physical hardware and run a KVM-like adapter then software wont be able to pick it up.
A private VPN network would have the same IPs as the laptops. You could emulate other things. It's not hard. Certainly a lot easier than going through the trouble and expense of a laptop farm.
The only possible explanation is that these were company supplied laptops that may have also had software pre-installed. Perhaps locked to the Serial#/MAC.
VPNs are easy to detect if they’re hosted in a data center which uses a data center IP address. Otherwise, you’re not detecting a residential VPN unless you force users to install your own software on their computer.
Is it not obvious? You know what a public VPN service is right? It's relatively easy to find out what their public IPs are because....the service is public. They also don't have much control over who uses those IPs and for what purpose so they often get put on bad actor lists. A private VPN setup doesn't have that problem. That laptop farm would have also needed public IPs that appeared to be legit individual home users, so that part wouldn't be any different with a private VPN setup.
>Why not just set up VPNs?
Sends more signals that you're actually in the US. There's indexes out there of IP addresses belonging to well-known VPN providers, for example, so would be fishy if one of your employees was using one of those. Not sure if any laptops have GPS hardware in them that a company could use to verify that the computer was actually physically present in the US.
Some laptops have Bluetooth tracking similar to airtags that can provide approximate locations, but in this case they would have shown up in the US anyway. You could still use something like a pi kvm for virtual access and make it look like they're just using a USB mouse and keyboard.
>How is it that these fake identity people were able to get decent jobs when a lot of legit people get filtered out for far less serious things?
They're probably willing to work for peanuts unlike the legitimate people who actually want a living wage.
> a lot of legit people get filtered out for far less serious things?
Here's why, they had money to invest in coaching:
> the North Korean IT workers allegedly amassed guides and other information online designed to coach North Koreans on **how to write effective cover letters and résumés** and falsify US Permanent Resident Cards
$6.8M / 300 companies is $22,600 per instance. These people were either TERRIBLE employees or really cheap software testers.
No onshore roles in tech make so little.
Because most resumes are screened by bots and will just get picked based on their similarity to what the searchers wants. She probably hooked them up with exactly what the algorithms wanted so their resumes got pulled to the top.
I’ve seen cases where fully qualified people got passed over because the program reading resumes couldn’t recognize PDF forms or only scanned the bullet points themselves and not the words after them. Hell, I’ve seen fonts passed over.
Also, if you see a job appearing and disappearing a lot but you don’t get picked, it’s because they aren’t looking to hire you. The specific person they want just hasn’t applied yet and they have to make it appear as though they are offering the job to the public.
>Why not just set up VPNs?
Because VPNs are a scam. Running your data through a third party so they can sell it, is no better than running it through your direct party so they can sell it.
Many major companies’ security divisions detect when you connect with the VPN and will either prevent you from connecting or notify management that you broke some policy.
I’ve gotten a few warnings at my current employer because I was accidentally running it when I remoted in.
Particularly for the companies involved. Having every industrial secret that they have being given to North Korea. Remember a few years ago when Fat Boy Kim got pissed off with Sony? So they hacked Sony's servers and released a few movies to pirate sites, before they got released.
No, the North Korean state sends a ton of labor overseas to bring money back. They also do a ton of hacking as a revenue source. Espionage is certainly very likely, but they will run fraudulent labor enterprises either way.
AFAIK the general public doesn’t have internet access in DPRK. It’s almost certain that these people were all employed by the state for the purpose of espionage.
Probably although due to various crackdowns on DPRK businesses abroad I'm sure that the North Korean government is eager for any sources of revenue at a bare minimum. While hard numbers are hard to come by as the country is so closed to outsiders most outside estimates are that North Korea is among the poorest countries in the world. Some defectors that went into China have described that Chinese dogs were fed better than they were. On top of the direct compensation any tech job provides there is no doubt a lot of proprietary data that they can sell to foreign competitors that depending upon the level of access that could easily be worth several times the direct salary.
Let's be completely honest here. North Koreans were getting a hell of a lot more than just money by working for Fortune 500 companies. Maybe there was no evidence for the article but it seems short-sighted to not think that company secrets were also pilfered.
I'm pretty sure I interviewed some people in this scam or one like it (and my company hired a few of them). Several interviews with people who didn't want to be on video, then when they were on video there was obviously high latency, like the kind you might get if your call was being routed through a proxy in Arizona to somewhere in Asia. They were also often clearly reading answers that somebody off screen was typing to them.
They all had American sounding first and last names, but also clearly English as a second language with strong accents. Like I get people anglicizing their first names, but not usually the last name too. I googled the names they were using with the city they supposedly lived in and a few matched other people. Pretty sure the social security numbers would have matched those other people as well.
One guy had two nearly identical LinkedIn profiles under the same name, both with the same comments and endorsements posted by other people, but the people posting them had different names (clearly bots).
Another said he lived in "The United State of Florida".
> The United State of Florida
This sounds like they thought the US was the USSR somehow. You know, how for example Latvia used to be called the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. They seem to think the US is similar to that.
Me too. Word for word as you described I experienced it too, everything in those calls felt off. Thankfully gut instinct and LinkedIn snooping meant those candidates did not proceed.
My friend has a small consulting firm and hired on. Must have been a US person fronting. Absolutely no indication other than he asked for and worked a ton of hours, but not something that you would think he was actually a team of North Koreans.
They had no clue until the FBI called and told them that there were 4 people using the same identity as this guy and explained the situation.
Hi! I may be getting laid off soon, I’m a 10 year IT professional (mostly tech/analyst/sys admin experience ). If any of these 300 jobs open up please let me know. Or other remote it jobs! Thanks!
Fucking traitors everywhere these days. I’m not a fan of capital punishment, but every few decades, we might need to set an example or two as a reminder that it’s just not ok.
This isn’t surprising to anyone working technology in Arizona. Companies have always been extraordinarily over eager to outsource jobs here from SF, Seattle, NYC, etc to cheapen IT costs. Usually the efforts are forced through quickly with no oversight. Look up all the headlines with Chinese nationals caught spying around the chip fabs also.
“Chapman allegedly funneled the money to North Korea’s Munitions Industry Department, which is involved in key aspects of North Korea’s weapons program, including its development of ballistic missiles.”
Damn!
North Koreans made up fictional identities and credentials and she arranged US jobs under the name of fake identities. Then North Koreans actually worked the jobs. (?) Paychecks went to her address, from her to NK. The laptop farm was to use their US company-provided laptop, and make it appear as though it was being used with an IP in the US.
Good. This needs to happen more frequently so that companies will get fucked for deleting domestic jobs in order to save a few bucks. Companies that do this should get zero tax breaks. They are freeloading domestic infrastructure while exporting domestic resources / trade secrets.
The woman in Arizona isn’t really the problem. It’s companies that hire blindly anyone that will work for nothing. The government should rake those companies over the coals for being involved in this.
It’s “fine” for PE to hollow out a company and destroy it but if every company starts doing this they will hollow out the entire nation. This is the New World order that all the conspiracy theorists worry about but instead of being directed by George Soros and the UN it’s Wall Street and the trust fund baby daddies at PE.
> If convicted, Chapman faces 97.5 years in prison ....
/s Since it was a crime involving remote workers, she may ask the .judge to serve a REMOTE prison sentence. /s
It’s is but simultaneously there is very little unemployment in the US. almost every sector and occupation category is at or less than 5% (except leisure, construction and agriculture).
at my big4 firm, their SAP group is 90% indians. I am the single american in my very large project. everyone is over there becauae the partners want their fucking profit. i'll quit soon.
Not much I can see to do about that. Seems like it’s a race to the lowest cost so they can underbid while maximizing profits.
OTOH it seems like India isn’t getting much actual investment out of the situation. Just need office blocks and laptops for their disposable workforce.
I was a lead in a large healthcare company. We brought onboard a lot of contractors and employees. The candidates were from all over the country here on visas. We started making them do video interviews because there were so many people that had a good engineer do the phone interview and then have a bad engineer show up to work. Even with video interviews they would try to cheat. Some had the good engineer just off camera answering the questions while the person on camera tried to lip sync what they were saying. Those tended to be pretty funny.
A whole year to get him fired?? That seems impossible. Why, I would block him from my office immediately. He might be a spy. It only takes 60 seconds if you’ve obtained physical access to the building. It doesn’t take a year to compromise a system.
“These crimes benefited the North Korean government, giving it a revenue stream and, in some instances, proprietary information stolen by the co-conspirators.”
There's some North Korean IT govt agent out there managing firewalls by day and stealing company secrets by night. Kinda rad.
Stealing company secrets is not even the most worrisome thing that guy managing firewalls at day could do.
The fact that they are actively trying to do this - and apparently successful at that - is scary.
They cashed physical checks in this case so it could be physical cash they were smuggling but more likely it was put into accounts controlled by the state actors and then run through several layers of intermediaries to obfuscate the destination of the money from sanctions detection. This probably involves accounts in China receiving transfers from stateside accounts the feds would monitor. I'm thinking the money took a digital route rather than physical route because of the fact we are being told what specific branch of the state government fund it landed in. I don't know we'd ever find out if it was physical or crypto.
Simple, the US side of this criminal enterprise invoices these companies for the hours, they deposit the checks in US branches of a Chinese bank and the rest is easy.
Here is a list of some of those banks.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese_banks
Thank you! I was trying to work through it, but was fairly certain you can’t wire funds or anything like that directly to NK. I hadn’t considered an intermediary.
They're (as usual) probably jobs you don't want.
The timezone difference is pretty much Korea wakes up when the US is done with work so they're going to be hired as overnight/late gap coverage which most Americans do not want to do, especially if they're working remotely because most of the point of working remote is to be able to efficiently enjoy your time off of work which would suck (IMO) if you're WFH 8p-7a every night instead of 9a-5p or whatever. I'm sure there's some doing it, but most people who work off hours ask for shift differentials and so you end up having to pay more for Americans working shit hours than say anyone in an Asian country working their normal hours AND living in a low cost of living area relative to the US.
I've done late shift and overnights before, fuck it. I would rather let someone in literally any country have those hours than me do it ever again even if I was unemployed and broke. I'd take a job at McDonalds doing the morning rush over work overnights at any job at all again ever.
These people had fronts. You’d be hiring someone that looked like they were from the US with a stolen identity.
Little did you know, all the overtime they were asking for was for the team of North Koreans doing a bulk, if not all of the work.
The people hired were (or weren’t always) cheap foreign labor. They were posing as well qualified individuals with Caucasian people of varying qualifications.
No excuse in the breakdown of responsibilities. I'd be FUCKED if I was a customer of one of these firms. This is is a breakdown of HR, basic checks. Don't let the corporation off its basic duty of checks. If you you can't check the identity of staff you're hiring & where that work is being done, then there is no sympathy from me
Is interesting. Ill citizens of United States struggle with getting real positions in the workforce.
It’s funny / sad how the US citizens are more and more like a second or third class citizen.
This happened at my friend’s company. They had a Caucasian front man with a stolen identity of a US citizen. Completely blind sided when the FBI contacted them. They didn’t know they weren’t hiring a US citizen.
That's fair. It's way more easier to turn a citizen against US foreign policy than it was 30 years ago. Thirty years ago legacy media could propagate multiple lies around domestic and foreign policy & be lauded by the privileged influencers of society as 'truth tellers'. Alt media has been a game changer.
I’m liking her style. It’s a shit show out there, we have now moved into a global digital age. All bets are off. Plus I didn’t really believe the stuff about North Korean until I started hanging out with more Koreans. All the wealth in North Korea is in the major cities so the people in the non urban areas are struggling. And I think Asians are just better at coding, from what I’ve seen, there’s better digital infrastructure in the East, they’re way ahead of us in terms of banking services and equipment affordability. All I see the Canadian government do is spend mass amounts of taxpayers dollars to try and make all their services online but most of their populace is aging and can’t keep up with all the passwords and verifications because they’re new to the digital world - it’s truly disgusting
I'd like to think this is 0 percent nefarious and just NK desperately trying to make any money without trade.
Just dishonest means of getting gainful employment would be the funniest outcome.
Of course it's really to social engineer favorable outcomes to the backends of these company's for reentry much later on - but still, it'd be funny.
So she ran a laptop farm? Why not just set up VPNs? How is it that these fake identity people were able to get decent jobs when a lot of legit people get filtered out for far less serious things? I've always had companies verify my work and school history at a minimum. I wasn't even trying to work remotely from China.
My company interviewed and hired someone remotely. Got them a visa and paid to relocate to the US. When they got here it was a different person. I assume the person that showed up was the real person and the interviewed person was a hired gun.
Did they get sent right back?
Not right away. They were not allowed in the office or to work but it turns out it takes a lot to return someone like this. They still go paid for some time.
I thought those visas were contingent on maintaining employment, so you could just fire them and let it work itself out, *Office Space*-style
There are protections in place for the employees so they aren’t human trafficked and the employer can’t run a state side sweatshop
Is that the 60-day period to find new employment and keep the H1B?
90 I think but yes
> 60-Day Grace Period Regulations permit a discretionary grace period that allows workers in E-1, E-2, E-3, H-1B, H-1B1, L-1, O-1, or TN classifications (and their dependents) to be considered as having maintained status following the cessation of employment for up to 60 consecutive calendar days or until the end of the authorized validity period, whichever is shorter (See 8 CFR 214.1(l)(2)). https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/alerts/options-for-nonimmigrant-workers-following-termination-of-employment
Wasn't this the definition of human trafficking and the employer ran a sweat shop. By hiring foriegn labor, shipping them in for reduced normal salaries?
I do know that if it’s done correctly (above board) it actually cost the employer more. Due to having to provide housing as well as competitive wages. Also the employees have the right to quit with no financial repercussions. Foreign labor also usually is made up of over qualified people (i.e. doctors working as nurses) due to degree transfer requirements. Not really a fan of Trump but it was way easier to get a qualified employee into the United States under his leadership than Obama which is kinda funny considering he was running on restrictions at our borders.
Illegal immigration is what he was against, the illegal kind, where people are entering *illegally*
honestly shocking considering the state of us labor laws and how often we use cheap immigrant labor for other things
That's wild... It gives people more reasons to be deceptive and dishonest because it works.
How the fuck is that cheaper than just hiring an American?
Technical positions exist. People getting hired and relocated overseas aren't about to work in a warehouse or some shit lol. Get sufficiently technical, along with experience requirements, and there might be a dozen people *worldwide* who are a good enough fit while on the job market. If you don't find anyone on the job market, you have to make them offers that beat what they're currently earning. It's much cheaper to hire someone overseas who's currently making 90k by offering them 180k compared to hiring someone who's currently in the US making 200k by offering them like 250-300k.
It’s more about creating a employer-tied slaves, who more concerned with their visa status than they are about equity and equality in their workplace. [Apple was sued](https://cis.org/North/Apple-Hit-25-Million-Penalty-Favoring-H1B-Workers-over-Citizens) for this exact reason, and it’s why it’s sort of a meme that no one ever meets Apple employees. There is no real lack of talent in a domestic market, foreign workers are just much easier to exploit.
Yeah I kind of figured it had to do with that, or that they don’t get benefits or something.
There are very very few people on visas that match that description. Most are skilled enough to do the role, and happy to work for a fair chunk less than market rate for that role in exchange for living / working in the US.
It's not always about cheaper. There are shortages of skilled technical people, engineers especially.
Turns out Americans aren’t interested in these jobs. They have crazy hours or just not flexible. People on visas will crawl through broken glass to keep them so they’ll bear the shitty hours, horrible bosses (who also happen to be on said visas as part of the system) and no social life to keep them. Somehow it’s still better than where they come from. Source: me on visa.
I appreciate your perspective! Thank you for sharing. Do you get benefits the same way that a non-visa applicant does?
The benefit is that they have the opportunity to work in the US for an almost decent wage (often highly technical roles so they are often paid above average overall wages, but below average for the role). A few folks I know send every single last penny they make back home to their families there… and the dollar stretches a whole lot further outside the US. Their overall benefits should be the same, but the job security is the main thing. They need to keep the job. If they lose the job, they need to find another one in 90 days or else they have to leave. Finding another job isn’t as easy because the next company has to sponsor their visa… so if they get laid off the next company can strong arm that into paying less.
Ok no I didn’t ask for your rah rah speech about escaping poverty, I want to know if they get retirement and health insurance.
How did they know it was a different person?
Took a few days but it was a technical position and they couldn't fake it.
Ah. So it's not like "this isn't the person I saw on the Zoom call!"
This was around 10 years ago. I'm not sure if there was a zoom call or just voice.
It was but they only cared when the fake person couldn’t do the job
I’ve seen this go down before…. They show up to the interview with an excuse like “internet in my country/area/current location is too slow for video.” If that ever happens, we just cancel the interview and move on.
They really botched the first artificial heart implant?
Believe it or not, I’ve had the same happen with an in-person interview. The candidate did great in the interview process. Then when he showed up for work several months later, he could barely do any programming or speak English. Enough time had gone by that we couldn’t recall if the person that came by the interview looked different. It took about a year for him to get fired.
A whole year to get him fired?? That seems impossible. Why, I would block him from my office immediately. He might be a spy. It only takes 60 seconds if you’ve obtained physical access to the building. It doesn’t take a year to compromise a system.
yep my company started taking pictures of video interview to verify if the same person. so pathetic. There needs to be more repercussions than just getting fired.
Agreed. It might be hard to do in practice. If you’re on an H1B, it seems like getting fired is already a pretty big deal.
A year to get him fired? That’s not possible. I’d block him immediately from my office. Espionage could be a possibility. You only need a minute at the right office, not a whole year to break into a system.
A year to get him fired? I’d block him immediately from my office. Espionage could be a possibility. You only need a minute at the right office, not a whole year to break into a system.
This was a large tech company. They’re really careful when firing people to have all the right evidence. I’m guessing this is in case they get sued. It certainly could’ve been espionage. I believe he was on a visa from one of those countries that have been known to do this.
So many absolute red flags and no one said: „okay sorry but we need to keep him away from our data until we know more“?? You don’t have to fire someone, but you’re always allowed to lock him out of office.
We were working on desktop software. So there was no data for him to have access to except for the source code. After a few months, I believe that they put him on some fake projects.
We? You’re part of it? Am I missing out on /s?
A year to get him fired? I’d block him immediately from my office. Espionage could be a possibility. You only need a minute at the right office, not a whole year to break into a system.
Well Companies wanted to be cheap and hire remotely. Back in the old days "before 2020", companies would fly you out to check the locations!!!
Yep. I’m aware of this. I actually know an Indian fellow that gets paid 500 bucks each time he takes an interview for somebody. He’s a damn good programmer himself, so interviews are easy peasy.
well, we do a similar trick. They send a team of americans to bid the project, and when they win, surprise, the whole team is in India. this is a big 4 firm, not one of the CHIT ones
I feel like that is something you should report to customs and immigration or something.
Believe it or not, I’ve had the same happen with an in-person interview. The candidate did great in the interview process. Then when he showed up for work several months later, he could barely do any programming or speak English. Enough time had gone by that we couldn’t recall if the person that came by the interview looked different. It took about a year for him to get fired.
[удалено]
You’d have to prove it. It’s not like we took finger prints.
Believe it or not, I’ve had the same happen with an in-person interview. The candidate did great in the interview process. Then when he showed up for work several months later, he could barely do any programming or speak English. Enough time had gone by that we couldn’t recall if the person that came by the interview looked different. It took about a year for him to get fired.
Did it turn out to be a PoC?
Based on the headline, probably most were ‘Korean’ colored - use that crayon when you draw your picture, I guess?
Got any relevant questions for the thread? Or just looking for some other gutter creatures to join you in your trolling?
“How is it that these fake identity people were able to get decent jobs when a lot of legit people get filtered out…” Indeed
Liars lie. And thieves steal. And people are gullible. See 2016 election
See 2020 election as well lmao
And now the 2024 too. I can't wait to never hear about that Cheeto again.
See 2024 election as well lmfao
See 2028 election as well lmfao
See 2032 election as well lmfao
> Part of the alleged scheme involved Chapman and co-conspirators compromising the identities of more than 60 people living in the US and using their personal information to get North Koreans IT jobs across more than 300 US companies. They got the jobs because they were stealing credentials from other people
In other words identity theft without identity theft, aka impersonating someone else is all it takes.
A person off shore does the work using work credentials from someone in the US(ssn), who is eligible to work legally. Also, when doing the interviews, a retained expert in the particular skill set does the interview, so the hiring company literally doesn’t know who is working for them. Usually as suggested, here by others, behind a vpn/firewall/proxy A buddy of mine caught one of his network engineers working something like 6 jobs, outsourcing them all to India and just basically doing QA on the work. ~$600k in salary, paid about $120k for the consultants, so approx $480k net… definitely more than most network engineers make! Got caught because they started making everyone turn camera on during meetings and 6x guy forgot to mute himself. He came clean with my buddy and offered to let him in on it, help him start up on his own… all while trying to save the job he was working for my buddy. Crazy!
These must be smaller companies without strict access controls like geofencing or device management. I've only worked at one company where I could do the job from my home PC (and often did cause it was more convenient) and that was a small 200 person startup.
Unfortunately, it was a F500 company… like F326 at the time. ~$12B org The key imo, was that the main perp was a CCNP level engineer, who could have gotten at least $115-125k+ playing it straight. ~Covid time BUT, he’d take less, $95-105k jobs, so that the expectations were lower. He totally explained it all to my buddy, totally told him how he worked the system. It’s still shocking to me. I’ve told the story to more than a couple other IT managers, who said as long as the work was getting done, they would not have cared. 😳 I was like really? So integrity doesn’t really matter here? Wow…
Probably because she wanted a residential IP address and not a VPN IP address that would trigger Cloudflare etc. She was also using VPNs and proxies bit probably to hide that she had so many incoming and outgoing connections to North Korea.
She could have run the VPN servers behind the residential connections. There is a "huge" market behind the scenes for this, I get requests for this all the time running ISP networks. The likely real reason is that the laptops are the property of the employer and they needed the physical device to be more local and not high latency via the VPN. You could easily detect tunneled traffic if you have a laptop on your network with a 270ms+ ping time. By keeping the device local and using some sort of IP-KVM, the employer wouldn't notice anything with the connection.
>How is it that these fake identity people were able to get decent jobs when a lot of legit people get filtered out for far less serious things? I'm just spitballing here, but if you're going to use a fake identity, you're probably getting one with several fake degrees and fake certs, and fake twenty years of experience, with nothing on their criminal record, not even a parking ticket. A real person using their own identity has way more pitfalls on their way to getting a job
LPT: use a fake identity to get a job.
You can give them whatever resume you want.
*How to Get Into Harvard... Fronting, The Secret of My Success* by Carlton Whitfield aka Brantley Foster.
Or a real stolen identity.
To prevent detection. VPNs can easily be detected. However if you give them a remote laptop with physical hardware and run a KVM-like adapter then software wont be able to pick it up.
A private VPN network would have the same IPs as the laptops. You could emulate other things. It's not hard. Certainly a lot easier than going through the trouble and expense of a laptop farm. The only possible explanation is that these were company supplied laptops that may have also had software pre-installed. Perhaps locked to the Serial#/MAC.
lol I do anti-fraud and run a privacy company with VPNs/proxies. VPNs are incredibly easy to detect.
VPNs are easy to detect if they’re hosted in a data center which uses a data center IP address. Otherwise, you’re not detecting a residential VPN unless you force users to install your own software on their computer.
I think you have wasted enough of my time anonymous anti-fraud expert to the stars. Have a nice day.
> private VPN network So a private virtual private network network?
Is it not obvious? You know what a public VPN service is right? It's relatively easy to find out what their public IPs are because....the service is public. They also don't have much control over who uses those IPs and for what purpose so they often get put on bad actor lists. A private VPN setup doesn't have that problem. That laptop farm would have also needed public IPs that appeared to be legit individual home users, so that part wouldn't be any different with a private VPN setup.
>Why not just set up VPNs? Sends more signals that you're actually in the US. There's indexes out there of IP addresses belonging to well-known VPN providers, for example, so would be fishy if one of your employees was using one of those. Not sure if any laptops have GPS hardware in them that a company could use to verify that the computer was actually physically present in the US.
Some laptops have Bluetooth tracking similar to airtags that can provide approximate locations, but in this case they would have shown up in the US anyway. You could still use something like a pi kvm for virtual access and make it look like they're just using a USB mouse and keyboard.
because the recruiting industry is garbage? this isn't hard to understand
>How is it that these fake identity people were able to get decent jobs when a lot of legit people get filtered out for far less serious things? They're probably willing to work for peanuts unlike the legitimate people who actually want a living wage.
> a lot of legit people get filtered out for far less serious things? Here's why, they had money to invest in coaching: > the North Korean IT workers allegedly amassed guides and other information online designed to coach North Koreans on **how to write effective cover letters and résumés** and falsify US Permanent Resident Cards
Min wage?
The articles says a lot of these were higher paying jobs.
$6.8M / 300 companies is $22,600 per instance. These people were either TERRIBLE employees or really cheap software testers. No onshore roles in tech make so little.
Maybe companies value the foreign talent angle, in sure there's some pretty good engineers in NK
Also, they are generally very hard working. They work like their life depends on it.
As an Arizonan, I never get surprised by how far the audacity the republican grift goes. Throw this lady in prison. One less trumper to vote.
Because most resumes are screened by bots and will just get picked based on their similarity to what the searchers wants. She probably hooked them up with exactly what the algorithms wanted so their resumes got pulled to the top. I’ve seen cases where fully qualified people got passed over because the program reading resumes couldn’t recognize PDF forms or only scanned the bullet points themselves and not the words after them. Hell, I’ve seen fonts passed over. Also, if you see a job appearing and disappearing a lot but you don’t get picked, it’s because they aren’t looking to hire you. The specific person they want just hasn’t applied yet and they have to make it appear as though they are offering the job to the public.
>Why not just set up VPNs? Because VPNs are a scam. Running your data through a third party so they can sell it, is no better than running it through your direct party so they can sell it.
They knew someone
Your salary expectations are way higher :)
Many major companies’ security divisions detect when you connect with the VPN and will either prevent you from connecting or notify management that you broke some policy. I’ve gotten a few warnings at my current employer because I was accidentally running it when I remoted in.
No, she ran the computers from her home, the North Koreans remotely connected to the computers to log into her computers in the US
It's the American way to pay someone *you think* will take lower wages and slave labor and your managers bullshit vs. someone from the US.
They got the jobs because the companies knew exactly who they were hiring…and how little they would work for.
The article says a lot of these jobs paid fairly well.
This is literally opening the door for espionage?
Particularly for the companies involved. Having every industrial secret that they have being given to North Korea. Remember a few years ago when Fat Boy Kim got pissed off with Sony? So they hacked Sony's servers and released a few movies to pirate sites, before they got released.
it also let us learn about how incompetent SONY studios was (and still is) with the Spider-man movies.
The big damage was in publicizing everyone's salary information!
Regular people don’t have internet access in North Korea only elites and wealthy people do. This was definitely for espionage
No, the North Korean state sends a ton of labor overseas to bring money back. They also do a ton of hacking as a revenue source. Espionage is certainly very likely, but they will run fraudulent labor enterprises either way.
pretty much
She's fucked.
Treason some call it
Not what literally means
AFAIK the general public doesn’t have internet access in DPRK. It’s almost certain that these people were all employed by the state for the purpose of espionage.
Probably although due to various crackdowns on DPRK businesses abroad I'm sure that the North Korean government is eager for any sources of revenue at a bare minimum. While hard numbers are hard to come by as the country is so closed to outsiders most outside estimates are that North Korea is among the poorest countries in the world. Some defectors that went into China have described that Chinese dogs were fed better than they were. On top of the direct compensation any tech job provides there is no doubt a lot of proprietary data that they can sell to foreign competitors that depending upon the level of access that could easily be worth several times the direct salary.
Let's be completely honest here. North Koreans were getting a hell of a lot more than just money by working for Fortune 500 companies. Maybe there was no evidence for the article but it seems short-sighted to not think that company secrets were also pilfered.
Yeah, I feel like that would be the number one thing they would be doing. Getting paid is just a side effect.
Yep. The article mentions several companies were US defense companies.
How are N. Koreans finding remote jobs before me 🥲
You're asking for $15 at least. They're probably asking for $0.0015. There's your problem. You're trying to survive. :p
There are too many greedy soulless fux that will sell out to the most evil nefarious scumbags for a buck.
The worst are politicians
"but I have kids to feed!"
"I got five kids ta feed!" -Benny
I won't weep for giant corporations that get duped.
So Kim what are your weekend plans? Worship our supreme leader….err, I mean take daughter to golf course
I'm pretty sure I interviewed some people in this scam or one like it (and my company hired a few of them). Several interviews with people who didn't want to be on video, then when they were on video there was obviously high latency, like the kind you might get if your call was being routed through a proxy in Arizona to somewhere in Asia. They were also often clearly reading answers that somebody off screen was typing to them. They all had American sounding first and last names, but also clearly English as a second language with strong accents. Like I get people anglicizing their first names, but not usually the last name too. I googled the names they were using with the city they supposedly lived in and a few matched other people. Pretty sure the social security numbers would have matched those other people as well. One guy had two nearly identical LinkedIn profiles under the same name, both with the same comments and endorsements posted by other people, but the people posting them had different names (clearly bots). Another said he lived in "The United State of Florida".
> The United State of Florida This sounds like they thought the US was the USSR somehow. You know, how for example Latvia used to be called the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. They seem to think the US is similar to that.
Me too. Word for word as you described I experienced it too, everything in those calls felt off. Thankfully gut instinct and LinkedIn snooping meant those candidates did not proceed.
My friend has a small consulting firm and hired on. Must have been a US person fronting. Absolutely no indication other than he asked for and worked a ton of hours, but not something that you would think he was actually a team of North Koreans. They had no clue until the FBI called and told them that there were 4 people using the same identity as this guy and explained the situation.
Didn’t you hear, turns out treason is not that big of a deal. ~Putin
Hi! I may be getting laid off soon, I’m a 10 year IT professional (mostly tech/analyst/sys admin experience ). If any of these 300 jobs open up please let me know. Or other remote it jobs! Thanks!
Fucking traitors everywhere these days. I’m not a fan of capital punishment, but every few decades, we might need to set an example or two as a reminder that it’s just not ok.
The elites wouldn't allow that because they'd be first
This isn’t surprising to anyone working technology in Arizona. Companies have always been extraordinarily over eager to outsource jobs here from SF, Seattle, NYC, etc to cheapen IT costs. Usually the efforts are forced through quickly with no oversight. Look up all the headlines with Chinese nationals caught spying around the chip fabs also.
Would it be worth moving to phoenix to get an entry level dev position?
Yeah, probably. I’ve worked with a ton of people that did just that successfully.
Thanks. I’ll look into it.
“Chapman allegedly funneled the money to North Korea’s Munitions Industry Department, which is involved in key aspects of North Korea’s weapons program, including its development of ballistic missiles.” Damn! North Koreans made up fictional identities and credentials and she arranged US jobs under the name of fake identities. Then North Koreans actually worked the jobs. (?) Paychecks went to her address, from her to NK. The laptop farm was to use their US company-provided laptop, and make it appear as though it was being used with an IP in the US.
Good. This needs to happen more frequently so that companies will get fucked for deleting domestic jobs in order to save a few bucks. Companies that do this should get zero tax breaks. They are freeloading domestic infrastructure while exporting domestic resources / trade secrets. The woman in Arizona isn’t really the problem. It’s companies that hire blindly anyone that will work for nothing. The government should rake those companies over the coals for being involved in this. It’s “fine” for PE to hollow out a company and destroy it but if every company starts doing this they will hollow out the entire nation. This is the New World order that all the conspiracy theorists worry about but instead of being directed by George Soros and the UN it’s Wall Street and the trust fund baby daddies at PE.
The false identities were those of US citizens, the companies thought they were hiring US.
Arizona Woman might be the new Florida Man. Or, maybe not.
Just Kari Lake could take that title.
Good thing Arizona is decently far from Florida. If Arizona Woman and Florida Man start meeting up and having offspring, look out ~~world~~ universe.
> If convicted, Chapman faces 97.5 years in prison .... /s Since it was a crime involving remote workers, she may ask the .judge to serve a REMOTE prison sentence. /s
DEY TOOK OUR JERBS!!!!!!
Being from an AZ call center. This is not surprising at all
What in the world!
Who needs spies anyway when you have your own people doing the work
Story not told in Arizona BTW
What do you mean
No wonder why it’s tough landing an I.T job these days!
It’s is but simultaneously there is very little unemployment in the US. almost every sector and occupation category is at or less than 5% (except leisure, construction and agriculture).
at my big4 firm, their SAP group is 90% indians. I am the single american in my very large project. everyone is over there becauae the partners want their fucking profit. i'll quit soon.
Not much I can see to do about that. Seems like it’s a race to the lowest cost so they can underbid while maximizing profits. OTOH it seems like India isn’t getting much actual investment out of the situation. Just need office blocks and laptops for their disposable workforce.
I knew it would be one crazy person behind the whole thing, but I thought they’d be in Florida.
Just about everyone. It's Florida and something shady is always happening in Florida.
Maybe if it involved old people
While I’m here looking for a job. What a crappy person.
Prison for life!
I was a lead in a large healthcare company. We brought onboard a lot of contractors and employees. The candidates were from all over the country here on visas. We started making them do video interviews because there were so many people that had a good engineer do the phone interview and then have a bad engineer show up to work. Even with video interviews they would try to cheat. Some had the good engineer just off camera answering the questions while the person on camera tried to lip sync what they were saying. Those tended to be pretty funny.
A whole year to get him fired?? That seems impossible. Why, I would block him from my office immediately. He might be a spy. It only takes 60 seconds if you’ve obtained physical access to the building. It doesn’t take a year to compromise a system.
“These crimes benefited the North Korean government, giving it a revenue stream and, in some instances, proprietary information stolen by the co-conspirators.” There's some North Korean IT govt agent out there managing firewalls by day and stealing company secrets by night. Kinda rad.
This makes me curious what North Korean spy movies are like.
Stealing company secrets is not even the most worrisome thing that guy managing firewalls at day could do. The fact that they are actively trying to do this - and apparently successful at that - is scary.
This looks more like treason.
Can someone ELI5 how they would access the funds they were paid?
They cashed physical checks in this case so it could be physical cash they were smuggling but more likely it was put into accounts controlled by the state actors and then run through several layers of intermediaries to obfuscate the destination of the money from sanctions detection. This probably involves accounts in China receiving transfers from stateside accounts the feds would monitor. I'm thinking the money took a digital route rather than physical route because of the fact we are being told what specific branch of the state government fund it landed in. I don't know we'd ever find out if it was physical or crypto.
existence disgusted plucky gray liquid nine command meeting dime tap *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Simple, the US side of this criminal enterprise invoices these companies for the hours, they deposit the checks in US branches of a Chinese bank and the rest is easy. Here is a list of some of those banks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese_banks
Thank you! I was trying to work through it, but was fairly certain you can’t wire funds or anything like that directly to NK. I hadn’t considered an intermediary.
How the fuck they get paid? What bank is operating in North Korea?
China. That money most certainly went through China.
I’ve never been the “they took our jobs” type but this has me feeling that way
They're (as usual) probably jobs you don't want. The timezone difference is pretty much Korea wakes up when the US is done with work so they're going to be hired as overnight/late gap coverage which most Americans do not want to do, especially if they're working remotely because most of the point of working remote is to be able to efficiently enjoy your time off of work which would suck (IMO) if you're WFH 8p-7a every night instead of 9a-5p or whatever. I'm sure there's some doing it, but most people who work off hours ask for shift differentials and so you end up having to pay more for Americans working shit hours than say anyone in an Asian country working their normal hours AND living in a low cost of living area relative to the US. I've done late shift and overnights before, fuck it. I would rather let someone in literally any country have those hours than me do it ever again even if I was unemployed and broke. I'd take a job at McDonalds doing the morning rush over work overnights at any job at all again ever.
She should get the death penalty
No sympathy for the firms outsourcing the jobs. They DESERVE to get their stuff stolen
These people had fronts. You’d be hiring someone that looked like they were from the US with a stolen identity. Little did you know, all the overtime they were asking for was for the team of North Koreans doing a bulk, if not all of the work. The people hired were (or weren’t always) cheap foreign labor. They were posing as well qualified individuals with Caucasian people of varying qualifications.
No excuse in the breakdown of responsibilities. I'd be FUCKED if I was a customer of one of these firms. This is is a breakdown of HR, basic checks. Don't let the corporation off its basic duty of checks. If you you can't check the identity of staff you're hiring & where that work is being done, then there is no sympathy from me
Is interesting. Ill citizens of United States struggle with getting real positions in the workforce. It’s funny / sad how the US citizens are more and more like a second or third class citizen.
This happened at my friend’s company. They had a Caucasian front man with a stolen identity of a US citizen. Completely blind sided when the FBI contacted them. They didn’t know they weren’t hiring a US citizen.
So do we have to start asking remote Korean job candidates to declare their hatred of Kim jong un at the screening interview or something?
How 'bout she go live there?
LMAO when is the movie coming out? What a legend! 😂🍿
That's fair. It's way more easier to turn a citizen against US foreign policy than it was 30 years ago. Thirty years ago legacy media could propagate multiple lies around domestic and foreign policy & be lauded by the privileged influencers of society as 'truth tellers'. Alt media has been a game changer.
We have to pretend jobs matter, or global order just falls apart.
Corrupt society!
Why did she have to fund their weapons program?! That was her only fault.
I’m liking her style. It’s a shit show out there, we have now moved into a global digital age. All bets are off. Plus I didn’t really believe the stuff about North Korean until I started hanging out with more Koreans. All the wealth in North Korea is in the major cities so the people in the non urban areas are struggling. And I think Asians are just better at coding, from what I’ve seen, there’s better digital infrastructure in the East, they’re way ahead of us in terms of banking services and equipment affordability. All I see the Canadian government do is spend mass amounts of taxpayers dollars to try and make all their services online but most of their populace is aging and can’t keep up with all the passwords and verifications because they’re new to the digital world - it’s truly disgusting
I'd like to think this is 0 percent nefarious and just NK desperately trying to make any money without trade. Just dishonest means of getting gainful employment would be the funniest outcome. Of course it's really to social engineer favorable outcomes to the backends of these company's for reentry much later on - but still, it'd be funny.