The Treasury Department has sanctioned 10 North Koreans and Russians powering Pyongyang’s sprawling IT worker fraud enterprise — a state-run operation that churns out stolen identities, fake résumés and fake IT employees who infiltrate legitimate businesses. The hundreds of millions of dollars in proceeds are then used to fund North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs.
The scheme is simple: North Korean operatives pose as legitimate IT professionals, secure jobs at unwitting U.S. and allied companies, and funnel the majority of their pay back to the regime. Once inside corporate networks, these workers can also access sensitive data, deploy malware and even extort their employers.
In diving into the global web of handlers, financial intermediaries and money launderers bolstering the fake identities, investigators discovered key…
Be skeptical of “Work from Home” offers that require you to receive money into your personal account and transfer it elsewhere, as this makes you a “Money Mule” in a money-laundering operation.