The Justice Department on Thursday announced the arrests of three people in a sophisticated identity theft scheme that officials say generates huge revenue for the North Korean government, including for its weapons program.
The scheme involves thousands of North Korean information technology workers whom prosecutors say are sent by the government to live abroad and who rely on stolen identities from Americans to get remote jobs at US Fortune 500 companies, jobs that give them access to sensitive information. corporate data. data and lucrative salaries.
The scam is a way for heavily sanctioned North Korea, which is cut off from the U.S. financial system, to take advantage of a “toxic mix” of converging factors, including a shortage of high-tech labor in the U.S. and the rise of remote telecommuting. Marshall Miller, chief assistant deputy attorney general for the Justice Department, said in an interview.
The Justice Department says the cases are part of a broader strategy to not only prosecute perpetrators of fraud, but also to forge partnerships with other countries and warn private sector companies to be vigilant about the people they employ. FBI and Justice Department officials launched the initiative in March and last year announced they were seizing website domains used by North Korean IT workers.
“Increasingly, compliance programs at American companies and organizations find themselves at the forefront of protecting our national security.” “Corporate compliance and national security are now intertwined like never before.”
The Justice Department says the conspiracy affected more than 300 companies, including a luxury retail chain and “a leading Silicon Valley technology company,” and generated more than $6.8 million in income for workers based outside the U.S., including in China and Russia.
The three arrested include an Arizona woman, Christina Marie Chapman, who prosecutors say facilitated the scheme by helping workers obtain and verify stolen identities, receiving laptops from U.S. companies that thought they were sending the devices to legitimate employees, and helping workers connect remotely. to the company.
According to the indictment, Chapman operated more than one “laptop farm” where U.S. companies sent computers and salaries to IT workers they didn’t even know were overseas.
At Chapman’s laptop farms, she allegedly connected overseas IT workers who logged in remotely to the company’s networks so that the logins appeared to be coming from the United States. She is also alleged to have collected salaries for foreign IT workers at home, forged recipients’ signatures for overseas transfers, and enriched herself by collecting monthly payments.
Others charged include Ukrainian Alexander Didenko, who prosecutors say created fake accounts on job search platforms and was arrested in Poland last week, and Vietnamese national Minh Phuong Vong, who was arrested Thursday in Maryland on fraud charges. getting a job with a US company that was actually being done by remote workers posing as him and based overseas.
It was not immediately clear whether any of the three had lawyers.
In addition, the State Department said it was offering a reward for information on some of the North Korean IT workers whom officials say Chapman helped.
And the FBI, which conducted the investigation, issued a public statement warning companies about the scheme, urging them to implement identity verification standards in the hiring process and inform human resources officers and hiring managers of the threat.