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Crime Technology IT

North Koreans Use Fake Names, Scripts To Land Remote IT Work For Cash 60

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Using fake names, sham LinkedIn profiles, counterfeit work papers and mock interview scripts, North Korean IT workers seeking employment in Western tech companies are deploying sophisticated subterfuge to get hired. From a report: Landing a job outside North Korea to secretly earn hard currency for the isolated country demands highly-developed strategies to convince Western hiring managers, according to documents reviewed by Reuters, an interview with a former North Korean IT worker and cybersecurity researchers. North Korea has dispatched thousands of IT workers overseas, an effort that has accelerated in the last four years, to bring in millions to finance Pyongyang's nuclear missile programme, according to the United States, South Korea, and the United Nations.

"People are free to express ideas and opinions," reads one interview script used by North Korean software developers that offers suggestions for how to describe a "good corporate culture" when asked. Expressing one's thoughts freely could be met with imprisonment in North Korea. The scripts totalling 30 pages, were unearthed by researchers at Palo Alto Networks, a U.S. cybersecurity firm which discovered a cache of internal documents online that detail the workings of North Korea's remote IT workforce. The documents contain dozens of fraudulent resumes, online profiles, interview notes, and forged identities that North Korean workers used to apply for jobs in software development.
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North Koreans Use Fake Names, Scripts To Land Remote IT Work For Cash More

North Koreans Use Fake Names, Scripts To Land Remote IT Work For Cash

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  • why are US work places hiring people with fake or stolen IDs?

    • For the most part businesses don't feel a duty to verify ID. They only want your social security number or visa paperwork in order to file the tax paperwork. Once payroll is taking money out of your paycheck to send to the government, the work place doesn't really care what happens to it.

      • That shit would change if a company found to have negligently hired someone unauthorized to work in the country were to be fined SIGNIFICANTLY (10% of gross revenue per occurrence).

    • I just saw a crime show about a guy who worked for a nuclear power plant who lied about having a physics degree his whole time there. There is a lot of trust going on in the hiring process.

      https://abcnews.go.com/US/paul... [go.com]

    • Because it's cheap (Score:5, Informative)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @12:24PM (#64021461)
      and they'd sell their mom's glass eye to save a buck.

      Absent heavy handed government regulation it's a race to the bottom. Starting in 2013 there was a *massive* outsourcing boom in drug manufacturing where it was all moved to India. The FDA can't really regulate India manufacturing facilities. To prevent international incidents they warn about inspections 2 months in advance.

      You can guess what happened next. Several people have died or gone blind because of contaminated eye drops. The companies involved will just shut down to evade punishment and move on.

      Government Bureaucrats are capitalism's referee. They're the ones keeping everything fair and safe. Imagine professional sports without referees. Doesn't matter if you have rules if there's nobody to enforce them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jmccue ( 834797 )
        wish I had mod points for you. Also it does not help the GOP is doing all it can to eliminate these inspections in the US. No wonder there has been an increase if salmonella poisoning over the past 20 years,

    • So that illegals can get jobs. It would be unfair not to allow people who do not have any right to work in the U.S. to not work in the U.S. I mean, racist much? Come on man!!

      • We could try to play whack-a-mole with literally millions of people, or we could go after the comparatively tiny number of companies who exploit them by imposing huge fines and jail time for anybody found to be knowingly hiring illegals to work.

        But it's like recycling: There is a truly massive corporate propaganda campaign that started and never ended whose sole purpose is to convince you that the responsibility lies entirely on the individual, where the least ability to effect change lies, and not at al

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by PPH ( 736903 )

          or we could go after the comparatively tiny number of companies who exploit them

          Small farms or construction outfits that need some extra help and pick it up at the Home Depot parking lot. Damn those greedy corporations!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Because greed is good and capitalism.

    • If you work for me you need to show up in person. And we are going to do a background check on you.

  • > to bring in millions to finance Pyongyang's nuclear missile programme, according to the United States, South Korea, and the United Nations. And working companies and individuals in China finances their nuclear weapons program, and taxes in republics like the US and SK finance their militaries.... it seems a bit sensational to point to one particular program.

  • workers only get 10-30% of the pay?
    and the body shop takes 30-60%?

  • I'm surprised NK would let anyone have this much interaction with the outside world, regardless of the money.

    • I'm surprised NK would let anyone have this much interaction with the outside world, regardless of the money.

      I'm surprised as well, this looks to me like they are quite desperate. I recall an interview with Michael Malice where he predicted that North Korea would collapse in five years. I suspect the timer ran out on that, at the time he was doing something of a speaking tour that was riding off his book on North Korea and some renewed interest in North Korea because of some high profile defections. His book came out in 2014 so that puts it within the last decade, but he's done interviews about North Korea many

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Yeah. Everyone on the new project dev team gets their first paycheck and starts comparing notes on what kind of BMW, Porsche, Tesla they are going to buy. NK employee thinks about finally getting a tire patch kit for his bicycle.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tyr07 ( 8900565 )

        Probably thinking when they get paid hopefully their family will be safe a little longer.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tyr07 ( 8900565 )

      Probably only people with family and ties back in NK that will keep them in check and behaving.

  • Doesnt seem like a good long term strategy if workers figure out how to leave and permanently adopt that ID, companies start automatically flagging candidates with suspicious credentials or skillsets, or payments are tracked in a way that shows where money is going.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • not so sure you have a valid point here. I am in the USA right now and everyone I know is supportive of North Korean's defecting to the rest of the world (USA included). I have never heard of anyone hating a North Korean defector.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by eth1 ( 94901 )

          not so sure you have a valid point here. I am in the USA right now and everyone I know is supportive of North Korean's defecting to the rest of the world (USA included). I have never heard of anyone hating a North Korean defector.

          It would probably be easy for the workers themselves to get asylum if they wanted to.

          BUT, I'm guessing the NK government knows this, and probably only chooses workers that have families to hold hostage. Defect, and your spouse and children will be murdered.

    • Doesnt seem like a good long term strategy if workers figure out how to leave and permanently adopt that ID,

      Leaving North Korea is going to be far more difficult than just landing a remote-work job outside North Korea.

  • Based on the blurb, it seems as if companies aren't bothering to look at who is applying. They're just doing it by email or text or something similar.

    Can't imagine hiring someone, even overseas, and not knowing what they look like, especially during the interview process.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Well if you do discriminate based on how they look then you'll be poorly positioned to defend against accusations of racial profiling.

        Who said anything about hiring based on how they look? Identification documents have included photos for something like 100 years, and even with the lack of a photo there would be some physical description that includes color of skin, hair, and eyes, their approximate height and weight, sex, and perhaps notable features like scars, tattoos, or birthmarks. That's not profiling to want to know what your employees look like, it's the basics of identification to run a check on if the person can legally perfor

    • are they working for some staffing firm on paper? and not directly on the books at the place they are really working for?

      • are they working for some staffing firm on paper? and not directly on the books at the place they are really working for?

        Does it matter? Is the hiring firm not doing a face-to-face? Why wouldn't they?

        Again, maybe it's just me, but I like to see who I'm interviewing. Most people aren't manipulative psychos like many on here trying to game the system so seeing how someone answers the questions, how they present themselves, what they're doing during the interview, etc is another piece to the hiring puzzle.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by spth ( 5126797 )

      How does "knowing what they look like" help? Or the ID you mentioned in a follow-up post?

      On the video call, you see the contractor. A Korean-looking person in an office. They might claim to be in South Korea or wherever else, and if you bother to check the IP address, it matches their claim as they are using a VPN.

      If you ask for a copy of some ID document, they have the support of the North Korean government, which surely can easily produce something that passes all the checks you as a private company can d

  • I think the bigger issue here is that this demonstrates how poorly remote workers are hired and managed. If they can get jobs with fake resumes, credentials, linkedin pages, etc, clearly they do not have the skills needed to perform the job, yet are hired anyway. This a a failure of the hiring process in skills vetting and a bigger failure of managing out staff incapable of job performance. This is really a huge incitement against remote work.

    • sounds like the overseas outsourced staff has been for years.

      With the faked resumes / credentials

    • Why do you assume they don't have skills? My guess is they do a great job for the money and fight for the chance to do it.
      • If they had skills, they wouldn't need to fake the credentials and secondly, this wouldn't be a story. Why do you assume they DO have skills given the extent to which they are willing to forge and fraud?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bert64 ( 520050 )

          They most likely do have the skills, but they have to forge their identities because most western companies would not hire someone that they knew was in north korea.

        • The reason I "assume" they have the skills is because they are successfully selling their time. The story says they earn between $100K-$300K / year, and that kind of money isn't given away for free. Companies don't have a big emotional attachment or even fear of lawsuit from firing overseas contractors.
          • nonsense. They don't have the skills, nobody is managing them, they're given a paycheck for denting a chair, and NOBODY in N. Korea is pulling down $300K. - escapees from Dear Leaders' land have parasitic worms https://abcnews.go.com/Health/... [go.com] and they steal each others human shit just to use as fertilizer: https://www.rfa.org/english/ne... [rfa.org] for god sake, the country is a literal shit hole. . Absolute and complete Occam's razor .
            You need to show proof of any of your claims. First rule of scienc
  • They are just acting on what has worked for others for many years. H1-B has had a big problem with fraud for years, and what was intended to be multinational, now mainly Indian, only for jobs that "highly skilled" workers that we were very short on e.g. A minimum pay set in 1989, has never been raised. It has become exactly what they promised it never would, i.e. replacement of American workers with cheaper labor that expect little to no benefits. Now IT has become the forefront of professional "gig" work

  • I saw this same story here a month or two back.

  • They're SO MUCH cheaper than US workers! How could we resist?

  • China for 30%. He gets to do other things while his Chinese outsource guy did the work. Oh, this is network admin.

  • On the internet, no one knows that you are a dog.

  • Just add this to the list of reasons CEO's will list as to why remote work and WFH have to end.

  • ...Nigerian princes to hire?

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