Is your new co-worker secretly North Korean?

Hello, Serge Engine is going to do for the very first time, I believe, and ask me anything episode. Which means that if you have a question about our show or recent episodes, or I mean, literally if you have a question about anything, we want your questions. They will appear in an upcoming episode. You just have to send them in. Please send your questions for me or for anybody else of the show to PJVote, V-O-G-T, [email protected], subject line, AMA. If you would like to send your questions as a voice note, you can also do that. Alright, our episode this week, after these ads. Welcome to Serge Engine. I'm PJVote. At Serge Engine, we get more questions about the American job market right now than about almost anything else. Our listeners are finding it very hard to get a job. Most people assume that's because of AI. They assume that every single job opening is getting flooded with AI applications, that those AI applications are then being read or not read by an AI agent. Most are spamming robots and meanwhile, humans are stuck trying to figure it all out. These humans wondering once this current mess does get sorted out, what is getting a job going to look like in our future? I suspect there are lots of reasons the job market is hard to navigate right now, but I was very surprised to learn about one of them, which is that North Korea, a country that most of the world has sanctioned, that the North Korean government makes hundreds of millions dollars a year, much of it from American companies, because North Korea has gotten very good at getting undercover North Korean workers into open American jobs. Sometimes they're there to spy or hack or steal, often they're there just to collect a paycheck. A reporter I know was on a team that learned the story of how that happened, how it currently works. And this reporter got very insane levels of access to essentially the North Korean side of all this. How these workers get hired, what their lives are like, where the money goes. And that is the question we'll be answering this week. The American job market is confounding Americans, how did North Korea get so good at navigating it? Okay, first of all, can you just introduce yourself and say what you do? Yeah, my name is Sam Kessler, I'm a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. And what do you normally cover, what's your beat? So technically I'm a data reporter, which means doing stories where we try to apply computers and programming to our investigations, but broadly I do a lot of more investigative coverage. I've done a lot of Trump money coverage. And this North Korea thing has taken up a lot of my life for the past year or two plus. Sam is a reporter I met back in the foxholes where we were both trying to make sense of the cryptocurrency wave of 2022, which meant frankly deciphering lots of very technical scams. Sam always impressed me with his doggedness. And not long ago, he told me he'd heard a very strange story from an old contact that has led him to all this. Around two years ago now, I still remember this pretty well, I got a tip from a source where they were like, hey, such and such crypto project, they're secretly run by North Korea. And at the time, I was like, that sounds insane, but obviously as a journalist, you put your journalist hat on and you start making calls, the very first person I called was this guy named Zaki who I end up quoting in an article and I said, hey, I heard this project is being run by North Korea. You know, is this a thing? He's like, oh, yeah, yeah, we hired a couple of them, I think, you know, we got this weird email from the FBI and he sends me the email and there's crypto addresses in it. And from there, I kind of stumble on this whole web of over a dozen companies in crypto that we were at least able to name that had hired North Koreans to work on their software. To say out loud what one of what the problems here is, it's that Kim Jong-un's regime in North Korea, one is like horrific to his citizens, like people live in abject poverty. People are put in camps from which like, they never escape and never return. Like, it is a hell on earth that's been allowed to exist because it's like very hard to disentangle. And if you went back 20 years, people were like, obviously, this like, hermit kingdom is going to end. And so far, people have been very wrong. And what Kim Jong-un has been very good at is like, despite lots of sanctions, despite being like an international pariah in many ways, the country finds ways to make money. And one of the ways it finds ways to make money is that there's this small cohort of people who the regime likes and trusts who are highly educated, who are really good at computers. And as soon as you have an internet, you have people from the North Korean regime scouring the internet looking for ways to make money. And so the reason an American company, even if you were like, whatever your politics are, the reason you would be like, I don't want these particular workers, is that one, the money is going to something that most people would consider evil. And two, they have no reason to be loyal to an American company. So like, the cheap North Korean coder who you're getting at half price because your money spends further in North Korea than it does in like Minneapolis, he has a very high incentive to turn around and help for documents, hacker company. He is loyal to Kim Jong-un regime, he's not loyal to like, whatever your crypto project is. Absolutely. I mean, one of the companies that I found to have hired these workers, as I was in the reporting process in Final Fact Checking, got hacked. This guy who realized that I forget the exact number of employees, but around half end of being North Korean, but the first employee that he realizes was suspicious, it came to his attention because they pretended that they were in Japan. And at some point, they said that there was an earthquake, and so they missed a meeting. And this company founder, he looks up, earthquake's Tokyo, which is where the worker said he was based. And there was no earthquake that day, so okay, that's weird. But you kind of just, you know, whatever you just note it, you know. And then the guy comes back eventually, I think he took a day or two off of work, and he just had a completely different accent. So at that point, he says to himself, okay, there's something weird here, and it's only been in the past year or so that this has become a thing that virtually every company in the United States, but not just in the United States, that hires remote workers has had to think about. So okay, so phase one was crypto, crypto ends essentially, I mean, crypto still exists, but crypto is like a dominant technology story as a thing that a lot of people are spending a lot of time on has greatly diminished. And you have these workers who, the North Korean government, they have to look at the internet and be like, okay, where do we go now? Like we have supply, where is labor demand, and how are we going to get hired? And the one thing that they have in their favor, I guess, is post COVID, there's a norm in American life that it is now normal to have an employee in a lot of places that just like, you never meet face to face, they never come in. So what do they do now? What is like phase two of secret North Koreans working at American companies? Yeah, so over the past year, my colleagues, Emma, Bob, and I have been looking at this North Korean IT work problem from abroad or lens, and we saw just this one group alone applying to companies across basically any industry that you can think of, I mean, like banks and financial institutions, tech companies, insurance providers, they're applying virtually everywhere. And they've updated their tactics to pass through hiring environments that are probably more strict than those crypto environments that they sort of, I guess, beta tested this strategy on going back a few years. So lots of people are working with North Koreans right now. Absolutely. When you re-anger report this story, did you wonder whether anyone at your news organization might be North Korean? Yes. I mean, it makes you wonder if anybody in any organization is North Korean. I don't think that there is a single company that is immune to this. Okay, so tell me about how you began to learn about face to face like, what was your window into this world that we would assume we would never get a window into? Yeah. So I love my job at the Wall Street Journal because one, I mean, for many reasons, but like one of my first days on the job, my editor Rob, he introduces me to MSGOT, which is, you know, she's a really fantastic video reporter. She had come into possession of a bunch of data that came from a computer that was used by a North Korean cell to work at jobs in the United States. What was really incredible at the time was that this data that Emma had had videos, screen recordings of the users of that computer doing whatever it was they did that day. There were these videos in there that literally showed them conducting interviews. You conducting like job interviews? Yeah. Good afternoon, Michael. How are you today? Hi. Hello, Derek. How are you? Hello. Yes, this is Derek. The clips that you're hearing are from the documentary Sam made with his colleagues, MSGOT, and Robert McMillan for the Wall Street Journal. It's called-- inside North Korea's operation to conquer the American job market. You all hear clips from their reporting throughout this episode. - Hello. - Hi. - Hi. - Nice to meet you. - And would you now or in the future require your sponsorship? - Am I in my U.S. Citizo? - So you were looking at the screen of the computer of one of these North Koreans as they were interviewing for a job. So on the bottom corner of the screen, a lot of these were Google meetings. You can see this North Korean person in a little video box. And then you have a bigger video box of the person that they're talking to, which is a person in the United States around some of these videos in the UK who thinks that they're just interviewing a job applicant. You know, obviously it's really crazy to watch anybody do a job interview, let alone like an undercover North Korean operative. And this isn't something I'd ever seen before, which is why it was so incredible. But what was really extraordinary about these videos is that we didn't only see the window of like the Google Meet or the Zoom meeting. We also saw the other windows that they had on their computers at the same time. So you could see half the screen occupied by this Google Meet interview, but the other half of the screen was a Chatchee PT window in many of these cases. - And I have an assumption, but I will ask, what were they doing on Chatchee PT during their job interviews? - You can see that by the time they pulled up this Chatchee PT window, it had already been prompted with something like, hey, I'm going into a job interview for a software engineering role. I want you to help me. And they will then take the live caption of whatever the interviewer is asking. - Do you have an experience with the Londoners? - Yeah, of course. - Copy it, paste it into Chatchee PT, and then kind of BS for a couple seconds while it's loading. And then the worker would just read off the answer. - I've used it for handling background tasks and triggering workflows and processing API requests in a cost efficient way. - But in some cases, the interviewers that we saw interviewing these candidates got a little suspicious. - Where are you based? I live in Pensions, you know? - What's the weather like now? - The best one that we saw was a man who asked the candidate, what is the weather like right now, where you are? And the worker is visibly flustered. He kind of just laughs for a second. And then you see other him or whoever's controlling the computer scrambling to open Google and look up this town where this person claimed to be based. - God. - Is it called? Is it warm? What's the temperature right now? - It's really cold, yeah, about 10 degrees Celsius, yeah. - And then he's like, oh yeah, 10 degrees Celsius, whatever it said. And one of the most interesting methods that interviewers have resorted to to weed out these workers and disclaimer, your mileage may vary. What they'll do is they'll literally say. - We get like a lot of imposter candidates, particularly North Koreans, like posing as like people that they're not. So one of the tests that we do is trying to get them to say, Kim Jong-un is a fat ugly pig. Could you say that for me? - Can you just say Kim Jong-un is the fat ugly pig? - Uh, she's young, she's young. - So no, Kim Jong-un, you know the leader of North Korea. Could you say that? - Because North Korean is not as excited where you criticize like the dear leader. - Exactly. So it's not always that exact wording, but basically say something bad about Kim Jong-un. And weirdly, they really often like don't, like they'll just hang up, they'll freeze. - This actually seems to work. - It seems to actually work. Like you have to, like apparently you can't say anything. - I mean when you read stories about like how Kim Jong-un has responded to insults or threats internally, which is like almost always death. I think it makes sense, particularly if you're right, and a lot of what's motivating these people is fear. Like fear for their own safe, fear for their families. Fear is gonna make you do the job interview to the best of your ability, but like fear of insulting. - Yeah. - The leader of your country might be like stronger than that. - And it might even just indicate to the interviewee, like hey, these people know what this is. And I'm not gonna last long here anyway. - Yeah. - Why take the rest, they figured you out. - Yeah. - Okay, so you guys are looking at the data from this computer. You're seeing the North Korean side of this, and what you're seeing is they've like industrialized the application process. So they're spamming tons of resumes across tons of industries. They apply for all these jobs. Are you watching them get jobs? Are you seeing them succeed to that extent? - Yeah, so we started with, I think it was like one or two of these computers, and then using this cybersecurity research archive, we were able to find other computers, linked to this same cell of North Korean IT workers. It was all led by this person who operated on a user named Eagle Vision. - Eagle Vision. - Eagle Vision. - So Eagle Vision's cell by our count got at least nine jobs just from the computers that we were looking at, and they were working these jobs, they were earning salaries. One of the jobs that they got was at Amazon. They apply for-- - They got a job at Amazon? - They got a job at Amazon. Yeah, through a contractor, I should be clear, like they had a contract role at Amazon. One of the ways that these workers are gaining employment has been through third-party IT recruiting agencies, so rather than apply for Amazon or apply for Google or Microsoft or any of these companies, they'll get a job at a recruitment agency, and that recruitment agency will theoretically check their background, sign off on this worker, and then pitch them. - It's so crazy. - It's so crazy. - Yeah, yeah. So through just a few computers data you're able to find, you see nine hires. Are you able to see whether they're good employees? - So when I was covering this in the crypto context, it really was sort of 50/50. You'd have some really good employees from my conversations with folks, and you'd also have some really bad employees. When it came to this particular cell, we did have the opportunity to talk to this father-son company in Florida. They had hired one of these workers, and they fired him. (laughing) They were like, "This guy does not have the skills." Can you say I am actually a little surprised that the North Korean workers weren't good employees? - So some of them are, and so you can't paint it with a broad brush either. Like this is a huge operation, and you have people, there's this one guy that I've been monitoring for years now. It seems like he's been doing this for like five years under various different aliases. So some of them are actually good at engineering. Like the crypto ones in particular, I've heard tend to be more competent from an engineering perspective, but I think in more recent years, it has become more of a volume game, more of a numbers game. You have students who are kind of being deputized within their study environment to apply for these jobs, and not all of them have the same level of engineering expertise as somebody who's been coding in the crypto world for like five or something years. - So they'll kind of take whatever job they can get, and if it matches their capabilities, they will do a good job at least in the beginning, and if it doesn't, they're taking a shotgun approach at this point. - Yeah. - And why did the father of son, companies say they had fired their worker? He just didn't know what he was talking about. - He was slow and he didn't seem as good as they thought he was. And in other cases, like we didn't only see interviews, and one of the videos that we got from one of these computers, you actually saw one of these employees being pulled in for a chat with his boss. Morning, Patrick. Morning. We're doing, doing a little bit better. - Oh, like the things aren't going great, chat? Yeah. - If you're gonna have a sick day, you need to tell us before nine in the end, because we need to shift everything, huh? - Yeah. - Not good, man. They are also, I'm still not fully confident about like your performance. I know you have the expertise, but I am missing all the kind of like communication with skills. - And I gotta give this guy credit. He said, you know, I know you have the technical skills, it's just the communication skills. I just don't think they're there. - It was like a nice class and how to deal with something like that. - Did the North Pole workers seem bummed to be fired the way anybody would be bummed to be fired? - So in that case, he was not fired. - He was being reprimanded. - He was being reprimanded, and he did look bummed. - And I mean, this is a guy who, I don't know his personal life either. Like, who knows if this particular salary was helping him hit a quota? - Yeah. - You know, and if he didn't hit that quota, the punishment for a lot of these people is you have to get sent back to North Korea. Or in some cases, you know, if you do something really wrong, your families are punished. - But they're operating under tremendous pressure, a huge pressure. Yeah. (upbeat music) - So that was the first glimpse Sam got of these North Korean secret IT workers covertly caulking in and caulking out alongside their completely unknowing colleagues. But thanks to the data his team had uncovered, he was about to learn a lot more. Most interestingly to me, he was going to learn about the existence of American co-conspirators to this North Korean scheme. Some waiting, some not. People in this country who'd found what really sounded a lot like highly compensated dream jobs, getting paid to not work. That story after short break. Welcome back to the show. So we only know what we know from reports that we've gotten from defectors from North Korea and just from research from our government and other governments that have like put out threat reports. What we do know is that these workers are forced to do this work. They're not always stationed in North Korea, often they're in places like China, that's the biggest one, sometimes in Russia, and they're often living in like sort of dorm style housing, at least in the reports that we've seen, where in many cases they even have like minors, where there's sort of people who are watching them monitoring them, making sure that they kind of like don't deviate from whatever they've been tasked with doing, which is this sort of IT work. Now there's like a varying range in terms of how these workers are treated and how much money they actually get for the work. Most of the money just goes straight back to the regime. And even in our reporting recently we were able to find ties from that money to companies that you know our government has linked to missile development and the North Korean weapons program. Crazy. And do you have the sense of like how much money this is worth to the North Korean government? Like how much is coming out of America and going into the regime? So like there's reports that our government and other governments have issued sometimes together where they try to estimate stuff like this. The most recent one a couple of years ago, it was $800 million a year going back to North Korea. But that's just a lower bound estimate really like we only know what we know, right? So it's impossible to really tabulate exactly how much money they're pulling in. But in my interviews, with experts on this, oftentimes they suggest that it's probably much higher than the recorded estimates. That's crazy. So it's like a significant pot of income for that government. Absolutely. And they've always done stuff like this because they're so heavily sanctioned, they're so kind of like on the outs with the global economy, although that's changed a little bit in recent months with Russia and China. But by and large, they've had to resort to stuff like this. This is kind of a new supercharged industrial scale version of that. And do you have a sense of like my understanding, like weirdly like North Korea is something that I breed a lot about. I've read a lot of the books that are the accounts of defectors. I've read sort of the journalists just trying to understand how Kim Jong-un has been so successful at maintaining power, long after people thought he would be able to. And it seems like one of the things that has really changed is that this idea that people in North Korea have no idea about living standards in the rest of the world is just like much less true than it was. And particularly for these workers, they're getting exposed via the internet to how different living standards are, liberty is in other places. How does the regime keep them from, if you're working out of dormitory in China or Russia, isn't there just an temptation then to de facto like, you're aware of how valuable your labor would be if you weren't giving a huge percentage to Kim Jong-un? That's a question that I had a really hard time wrapping my head around when I first got into this. Especially when I was on the crypto end, there was so much money flowing around. It's also like this terminally online culture where for these people to be working at these companies, they needed to know not only what these companies were, these crypto projects, but they needed to be versed in a sort of weird online culture with like Lambos and, you know, NFTs and, you know, just money. I found crypto to be a second language as a English speaker. Yeah. And they're approaching English as a second language, then crypto as a second language within the second language. Yeah, and it's like a language of excess, you know, but they were fluent in that language. So clearly they know the culture and they're seeing the culture. That was hard for me to wrap my head around at first, like why do they not defect? And the answer that I hear time and time again from experts really comes down to the system of punishment in North Korea, which is focused more on the family. So if you do something wrong, it is not necessarily you who is going to bear the consequences. It's whoever is back home still in North Korea, who might also suffer from whatever your perceived trespass is. And what I know just from reading is like, there's so much we know about North Korea. But like what the international humanitarian community seems to assume is that they have something like a constantly running death camp that is just completely shrouded to us. So I can imagine a world where even if you were tempted to escape your job, the idea that unspeakable horrors can be visited on your family seems like a pretty strong incentive for not doing that. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. One of those that is tricky is if you're a North Korean employee, secretly working in American firm, you still need a place where checks can be sent because you're not in crypto. And like you sort of need like a mailing address. How do they solve that problem? So this entire thing would not work without the help of local so-called facilitators. So people who are based in whatever country these workers are, you know, working jobs in. People who are locally based in, for example, the United States, running laptops, cashing checks, even showing up for interviews in many cases. And sometimes even showing up for jobs, working jobs, having the North Koreans do the coding and whatnot in the background. So you're going to work in your computer, you're playing like whatever job is script web games. Your work is being done by North Korean. Exactly. How does a North Koreans find these Americans and who are the Americans who choose to do this? So we had the opportunity to interview this man named Derek Goon. I'm Leary about it at first, but, you know, after talking for a little bit back and forth, I was like, yeah, you know, let's give it a shot, like lo and behold, like it ended up actually doing pretty good. I mean, I've had a passive income for the last year and a half now. We learned about Derek Goon because he started to something called a laptop farmer, in order for these North Koreans to work jobs in the United States. The biggest hurdle that they need to leap over is they need to have a laptop that looks like it's based in the United States to do all of their work on. So such and such a company will send you your corporate laptop. And then a laptop farmer will put down their US address to receive that laptop. They'll download some sort of software. Sort of like physical hardware that the North Koreans will use to tap into these computers, but basically, Derek would, you know, turn off and on the computer. And the North Koreans would be doing the actual work because they could control it from their end. They would schedule up interviews and they could sit and do these interviews with them. All I had to do was just show up and, you know, land the job. And then you get one of those remote laptop sent to you. It's not any more difficult process than that. Like it's a remote job, you know, I get to live more free, I guess. I can go to school full time and then still carry this out, you know, it alleviated a lot of stress for me. Derek is a man who lives in Okarbor, Ohio, which is really a lower income farming town in the outskirts of Toledo. We traveled out there a couple times to meet with him and he was actually really generous with his time and with all the information he shared where this is a guy who essentially had a background. In this case, it's kind of coincidentally in the world of crypto and he was really spending a ton of time online. He's like in his mid-ish 30s now. He was spending a ton of time online on internet forums and eventually he comes into contact with people who connected him with somebody, who ended up being an associate of eagle vision, which is the person who led the IT worker's self, North Korean, that we were focused on. But so this guy is like, "He's a guy who could use some money, who am I going to ask?" And he's online and somebody says, "I know where you can make some money online. I'm just going to introduce you to this guy." Exactly. And just to go one step further really quick, I managed to talk on the phone with one of these recruiters. I identified myself. I said I'm a journalist with a Wall Street Journal and we're not, you know, going undercover or anything, but regardless, this person essentially walked me through what their pitch looks like. What does their pitch look like? What would you be able to put for a very skill? But this language gets sometimes mixed it harder for us to win new presents. That's why we are looking for a floating speaker who can study during the interviews. They say I work with a team of developers in such and such country. In this case, I think he said he was in Ukraine and their workers don't have really good English ability and they just need somebody's help getting projects. And in order to get that help, you'll attend interviews and, you know, the ideas they'll do, the work. And it's really okay because they're still doing the work. It's just. You'll be the face. And the idea being like. You're just helping them out. We're asking you to do some unusual, but to help people in this other country who have expertise but not great English skills who Americans feel like a lot of sympathy for. Ukraine is kind of the opposite in terms of their favorability from North Korea. Yeah. And there's a little thin veil of plausible deniability. Exactly. And maybe you know, some people are lacking some level of like discernment with something like that, but also some people just need money. And if you have an excuse to do something that you can convince yourself, maybe authentically feels like a good thing to do, why wouldn't you take the money? And how good is this salary for being an American friend for North Korea? and worker. It varies a ton. So the gentleman that we spoke to, Derek Goon, he was conducting interviews for North Korea. He was also doing a bunch of odd jobs. I guess you could say for them, so he would show up to the interviews and he also worked a job where he used his first name and middle name to work at a company for over a year. It's always the same amount, same salary. This was a 75k year salary, so my cut is 50%. Yeah, they're pushing a lot of money. It's a pretty big operation for what I've seen. He takes half the salary to just show up. Yeah. And then he just sends, somehow he sends the money to his fake Ukrainian, actual North Korean Minder, and then they use whatever rails on the Internet to get it back to missile development. Derek is pretty versed in crypto, so he was kind of a perfect quote unquote facilitator for these North Koreans. So he would just convert to crypto and send it to them. And that was part of how we were able to trace some of this money back to the regime. And did he suspect it wasn't Ukraine? He had his suspicions. So he said initially that he thought that they were in Brazil. And he was like, "No, you're not. You're not in Brazil." But genuinely, these people were actually based in China. Based on our own research, we were able to attract their IPs to Shenyang, which it's kind of near the border of North Korea where a lot of these IT workers are based in China. And he figured they were Chinese. He knew not everything was on the up and up, but he figured what he was doing he didn't believe was, you know, unethical or illegal. If I'm arrested, what would I be arrested for all I did was handle a job that was in my name and somebody else was coding for me? The illegal parts? I don't want to associate with it. Like, that's just not me. When you told him, "Hey, you're not laptop farming for China. You're laptop farming for North Korea." What did he say? So at first, when we first spoke to him, he's like, "I don't care where anybody's from." It was almost like he thought we were racist for suggesting that they were North Korean. But over time, he came to understand, and at a certain point, I think, except that he was involved in something pretty sketchy. My moral compass is starting to lean more towards like, "Dude, these guys are in a shady or business and I thought, I mean, how do I get involved in shit like this, man?" And that it might have involved North Korea. Well, when I mentioned something I was like, "Yo, do you in North Korea or something?" Like, he got really pissed off of me when I said that. He says, "No, why would you even think that?" I was like, "Well, because I guess some sources that say you were." And I think a big tipping point for him was when he received a $10.99 form showing around $100,000 in income that he didn't recognize that he assumed was eagle vision, his North Korean handler, working jobs under his name without his permission. So they basically stole his identity. Which is why besides maybe you don't want to support the regime, this is not a good idea because you shouldn't give North Korea your social security number. It's not a great idea. And that's one of the biggest problems with this. Like, one of our goals with our documentary was to show a side of this, which is the identity theft side. Right. In order to get these jobs, these North Koreans are sometimes using sort of pseudo, sort of witting, unwitting, helpers like a Derek Goon who was actually willing to interview at jobs under his own identity in some cases on behalf of the North Koreans. But most of the time what they're doing is they're using fake or increasingly just stolen, like straight up ripped off the internet through some shady dark web site. They're sealing identities and using those identities to work for jobs. Good afternoon. Michael Brown, M-I-C-H-A-E-L, Brown. I'm calling because you guys actually supposedly had me working for you guys. My identity was apparently used. After the break, Michael Brown, actually the many Michael Browns. [Music] [Music] Welcome back to the show. So Michael Brown is a man who lives near Atlanta and his identity was stolen by North Korean IT workers to work at various different jobs. He knows how they got it. He doesn't know exactly how they got it but we were able to find Michael Brown's name and his social security number and everything for sale on one of these forums. Specifically, we actually found it on Telegram, the messaging app, where it's pretty frequently used or at least was by the team that we were tracking to buy and sell fake identities. They were of course buying the identities or at least were looking for them in the data that we could see. So we saw Michael Brown's ID for sale. We knew that his identity was stolen. I was informed my identity was being used when I went to the Department of Labor to check on unemployment. The lady just so happened to see that I had multiple jobs around about the same time in completely different states. So it was more like, hey, are you working all these places? And I'm like, no, I've been working for the same place for the past two years. We accompanied him, my colleague, Emma did to the Department of Labor in Georgia and they found nine different companies had been worked under his name that he had never part of, you know, a lot of them worked for. Have you seen his man resume? Oh my god. Have you seen the jobs that I've supposedly worked and the little amount of time they work and how much the money they've made? But yeah, here I am. Whole life it just took. Somebody else is living like me right now. So we don't know if North Korea worked all of those jobs, but we did find them working at least two jobs. From our data, we were able to like, you know, confirm 100% and one of those jobs was that that job at Amazon. So somebody worked at Amazon using Michael Brown's name, but Michael Brown didn't receive the salary and he is stuck on record having received some crazy level of income that just doesn't match his actual earnings and that just saddles you with a ton of problems. Can't get a bank account. I can't get a rental property in my name. So until I guess I get some type of resolve from this or some type of answer, some type of information, then life can start back I guess moving normally on that side. He's had trouble applying for loans, including a college loan for his daughter, which is really a shame. Like he, he had trouble for a really long time finding a job, opening bank accounts. It's been the main thing going on in his life is this identity theft. The most people can say is, well, yeah, you got to have to make some calls and get this fixed and now you can have to answer a million questions like, you're the one who stole your own identity. And it's like, so what do you do at this point? It's been over a year and he still hasn't figured out how to get out of it. It's really hard. There's some resources for people in these sorts of situations, but it's really hard to navigate. Like we actually recorded him. He was kind of to let us watch as he called one of these companies that supposedly had hired him and they can't even confirm anything other than his employment dates because they're not sure he is who he claims to be. Yeah, it's so hell. It's horrible. And there's so many people who are in exactly his position. And are there consequences for the Americans who like are knowing laptop farmers? Like I imagine you're breaking some laws in doing that. Yes, it's interesting because we can't arrest North Koreans in North Korea, but also in China, Russia. We don't have extra tradition treaties with any of these countries where they're typically basing their workers. So the only thing that law enforcement really can do is go after the Americans or sort of aiding them, sometimes wittingly, sometimes less wittingly. But we interviewed some FBI agents for our reporting and we even have one of them saying, we're under no grand illusion that we're going to arrest our way out of this problem. Like law enforcement action alone is not the solution here. It's just not that kind of a thing. It's much more deeply rooted, it's more of like a systemic thing. You know, how are you going to arrest your way out of credit card fraud? Yeah, it's going to keep going and it's going to morph. And I think that that's what this is. The only way to get out of this problem is to pair those law enforcement actions with corporate hiring practices, corporate vetting practices, industry flagging this to corporations to help prevent this as well. Corporations flagging it to the US government. What is the thing you're trying to figure out now? You got a glimpse of this, you guys reported on this, presumably, like, eagle vision and the North Korean government tracks the Wall Street Journal's reporting, like, where is this story been evolving? I mean, they keep on changing their tactics. Just like they've evolved to do this IT work, they're also evolving the IT work itself. So there's examples we've heard about where they're subcontracting the IT work, where a North Korean will, you know, get a job and then put it on upwork or something like that, and get somebody else to do it for less money. So they're not even doing the actual labor, they're serving as middlemen. The AI side of it is expanding, like, crazy, of course, where, I mean, one of the things that's the most frustrating about this whole thing from the perspective of a job applicant in the United States. When you see the way that they truly have industrialized this process, it's not just chat GPT. They're spamming out so many resumes to so many different companies with the help of AI. They're also using AI to literally change their faces. You will have them using FaceSwap programs that have been getting better and better to look like a different person or look like a different ethnicity. They're also doing accent swaps, I mean, just deepfake technology that they were already using like a year or two ago is getting way, way, way better. And some of the experts that we speak to tell us that very soon it's going to be impossible to discern between an AI deepfake, somebody who's using a fake face and somebody who's using a real face and, you know, using their real accent. So we're kind of just trying to understand how this whole thing is evolving and how slash whether it's, you know, possible to detect this as an employer. It's such a thorny problem, but it sounds like what you're describing is actually not a problem that gets solved. It's a problem that gets managed. Like it sounds like it is just probably a going forward fact of American life that sometimes if you work in a large enough company that uses enough remote workers, the person who's troubleshooting something for you or the job application you're reading just is not who you thought it was. Yeah. And we're even seeing companies that exist now that are aimed at tackling basically exactly this. People who are misrepresenting themselves in the labor market, you're figuring out if you're interviewing a deep fake candidate, figuring out if a candidate has applied to a hundred different companies using slightly different resumes that don't line up all with one another. You pulled all that data together. It's easier to parse out an applicant who applies to like one of your clients as fake. It's sort of the kind of algorithmic fraud detection that like a credit card company would normally use. No, this person doesn't usually use their visa and a gas station and overseas all of a sudden. But now you're just trying to build similar databases and similar recognition systems for job applicants. Yeah. It's so crazy. It's so like it just gives me that feeling that I keep encountering it like we've built a very strange world with very strange problems. Yeah. It's just such like a 2026 thing, right? Yeah. Damn, Kessler. As I said, a wonderful reporter. You can find more of his work over at the Wall Street Journal and I highly recommend watching his team's full documentary on these North Korean IT scammers. There are so many details we did not have time to include here. We'll have a link to that documentary in our show notes. Check it out. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]