Today, Explained - My colleague, the scammer

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

North Korea has been sending young, tech-savvy operatives to pose as ordinary American job seekers. Tech reporter Bobbie Johnson investigates the scam. This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Further reading: North Korea stole your job by Bobbie Johnson. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Photo of North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un by Contributor/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of the big challenges of hiring remote workers is you don't really know who you're hiring. Recently, the FBI warned that many companies really don't know who they're hiring. Big American companies like Google and Sentinel One have been tricked by compelling resumes and LinkedIn profiles into hiring North Koreans. Now to the story of spies in the break room. US, the UK and South Korea have jointly accused North Korea of using a cyber espionage group to steal sensitive and classified data. Ahead on Today Explained we talked to a reporter

about what it's like to sit in on a job interview with a North Korean operative. We tried to keep it as simple as possible. So I was just introduced as someone who was sitting on the call. We didn't want to alert them to, obviously, the fact that I was a journalist, because we didn't want to scare them away. We wanted to see what they had to say.

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Those jeans? That jacket? Those heels? Is anyone paying full price for anything? Stop wondering. Start winning. Winners find fabulous for less. What's up, y'all? It's Kenny Beach,

and we are currently watching the best playoff basketball since I can't even remember when. This is what we've been waiting for all season long. And on my show, Small Ball, I'll be breaking down the series matchups, major performances, in-game coaching decisions, and game strategy, and so much more for the most exciting time of the NBA calendar.

New episodes through the playoffs available on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to Small Ball with Kenny Beecham so you don't miss a thing. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. The life of a freelance investigative reporter is not an easy one.

A lot of time is spent figuring out what story is going to justify your time and talents. Such was the problem for reporter Bobby Johnson, who's based in the Bay Area. Late last year, Bobby had been hearing about people using AI to run scams, and he decided to see if there was anything there. And so one evening, I bumped into this young entrepreneur called Simon Weichman's at an event in San Francisco and I shared with him what I'd heard about and asked if he'd heard about anything and he said, well, you'll never guess what happened to me recently. It turned out that Simon runs a web security company and he'd been interviewing people for

a software engineering job, a remote software engineering job, so people not based near HQ. And in interviewing, he'd seen a bunch of deeply suspicious activity. He was worried that people were trying to fraudulently get jobs or something, and it turned out to be far more complicated and weirder than we expected. So what Simon spotted in the first place was that the job was bombarded with candidates, right? So there were hundreds of applications, way more than was typical. Then he started getting on video interviews with people and strange things kept coming up. Lots of the applicants had resumes that didn't really match what he saw on screen. Maybe they had Anglo names but were ethnically Asian.

A lot of them said they were born and raised in America, in Tennessee or in Brooklyn, but they had really, really thick foreign accents. They all aced their coding tests in almost exactly the same ways, but when he was talking with them, they often gave stilted answers and asked questions just about salary, but nothing else. And there were other things too. So they all used similar default video background images. They had laggy internet connections and in the background he could hear noise.

So it sounded like they were in a busy room, not a call, like a call center, maybe not what you would normally do a job interviewing. So these things, you know, individually, he didn't see any of these as a major red flag, because you can imagine why somebody's name doesn't fit their face in your conception, right? Or why they have an accent or why they use a default background on their video call. But as he spotted candidate after candidate, following the same pattern. He started to get really suspicious of them. And then the clincher really was that he saw one of the candidates was wearing

glasses and as the candidate was answering questions, Simon could see in the lenses of the glasses a reflection of an AI bot on the candidate's screen. So what he could see was that this was pumping out a script of some kind for the applicant to read in order to answer Simon's questions and he could see this happening in real time. So at this point he figured, you know, his paranoia was well justified. What emerged as we got deeper and deeper in were not just that these were people who were, you know, trying to fraudulently get jobs or people who were maybe running several different jobs at the same time, which we've seen a lot since the pandemic. But in fact, we were able to connect them back and see that they were actually

operatives who are working for the North Korean regime to try and get jobs and send money back to North Korea, which is, it turns out, this kind of pretty widespread scam that's been perpetrated against American companies particularly, but all around the world. So by the time you met Simon at that event, he had clearly copped on that something was up here. Had Simon actually hired anyone in North Korea? No, so he'd realized that something strange was going on and hadn't hired anybody. But there are lots of companies around the country who have been hiring North Koreans unwittingly. And this is actually, it turns out, it's a pretty widespread operation and well known

in the cybersecurity industry and in parts of law enforcement. But it's really not something that's broken through into the public consciousness. Most people don't actually know about it. So when we started to put the pieces together and understand what was really going on, that's when the breadth and depth of this thing became apparent. How does this work? And to what degree is this going on? The scam is kind of basic in some ways, but wild in others. First of all, on the simplest level, you have teams of North Korean agents

who are recruited out of college and they get sent to work in other kind of friendly countries, typically China or Russia. They cross over the border and they go work in these teams. They steal people's identities and they use those identities to apply for jobs. So they steal American identities and use them to apply for jobs in the US. And they use all manner of AI enhancements to get the job, you know, like they use the AI coding tools to ace the test, they use the chat box to script their answers so that they sound more competent.

They use deep fake technologies to cheat ID verification and some of the tests that you have to go through in order to get a job. So if they're lucky enough to get through the interviews, the surprising thing I think is they actually generally do the job that they've been employed to do. This is usually building websites or apps for a company, completing different tasks, you know, IT related stuff, and often they share those tasks around their team. So there might be 10 or 15 people

working in a team doing multiple jobs and they basically are doing the minimum to stay employed. But because they share the tasks around the team, they're often very efficient and seem to be doing their job pretty well, so they stay under the radar. And all of this gives them time to earn cash that they then send back to North Korea. Now, software engineers can be pretty well compensated, so that can be a substantial amount of money, but they also use that access that they have as a developer to go and steal information, money, cryptocurrency, and even in some cases plant malicious software on the victims computer systems. In many cases

they don't get through to being hired, you know, they're just trying, they're testing the system, but when they do get through sometimes they only last a few days until they do something that's clear that they're not who they say they are. But sometimes they stick around. I mean, I spoke to some victims who have unwittingly employed people for up to a year. You know, they've been working in a company and getting away with it. But the real trick, I think, and the key weakness in this scam is that they need to use a middleman in the US. So, you know, the company will send forms to fill out, they'll send the computer for the developer to use, they'll, they need a place to send paychecks, you know, all of

these require somebody on the ground. And if you're in a North Korean team in China or Russia, you don't have that person. So they work with an accomplice who manages the physical stuff. So they're based in the US and they will install software that lets the North Koreans dial into their computer from overseas and still look like they're in New Jersey or California or wherever they say they're based. So this means you have these middlemen who have houses full of laptops that all connect up to all the different jobs

that they're working. And law enforcement calls that a laptop farm. And the accomplice gets up every morning, switches the computers on, makes sure they're all running properly, lets the North Koreans dial in to those computers from overseas, and then carry on the job and carry on the subterfuge.

And in some cases, the facilitators who have been caught, they've been found with like 50 or 60 laptops running simultaneously in their house. And that's the place where law enforcement is actually able to catch these gangs, understand what's going on and try to stop it. So there's one case particularly that I dug into which is of a middleman or middlewoman in this case called Christina Chapman who recently pled guilty to a range of different

crimes related to this. Hey, lovelies. It's me. So today I am not being too experimental. I found something called Avocado Fries which are... She was based in Minnesota and Arizona and over the space of a couple of years she worked with a North Korean team and helped them target at least 300 different companies in the US including some pretty substantial ones.

Howdy people. So today I think is day seven and I did not make my own breakfast this morning. My clients are going crazy so I just- Some of them were mom and pop shops, but some were big corporations. And Chapman ran this scam. She would help the teams do their IT work.

She would host a laptop farm with maybe 60 computers at the same time. And she would help them dial into meetings or keep up to date with stuff. She would receive money that she would then pass along to a bank in China and take a cut along the way. New at 10, an Arizona woman has been indicted in a series of complex identity theft cases that have been generating money for the North Korean government.

Christina Chapman was working out of her house in Litchfield Park. Someone approached her on LinkedIn, asking her to be the US face of their company. What that meant was- She got drawn into this as far as we can tell by the fact that there was a promise of some money and it was an easy way to earn some cash and what when I spoke to security experts about this they said it's really typical for somebody to get

drawn in you know and that's why they choose folks who are able to stay under the radar right people who have no significant profile, people who can just look ordinary and behave in pretty ordinary ways. The woman who lives around the corner from you, or the guy who lives in the apartment block or whatever, just ordinary folks who can help perpetrate this scam without raising too many suspicions. Bobby Johnson, he's a freelance investigative reporter. He ended up writing this story for WIRED.

Coming up, Bobby goes to the flip side. Who are the North Koreans? Support for today's show comes from Delete Me. More than likely, there is a lot of your personal information online. Some of you may have even willingly posted it, but having your name, address, phone number, and family member's names hanging out on the internet can have actual consequences in the real world and makes you vulnerable, says DeleteMe. According to DeleteMe, you can protect your personal privacy or the privacy of your business from doxing attacks before sensitive information can be exploited. Our very own Claire White has tried DeleteMe. Here's what she has to say.

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We're back with Bobby Johnson, who wrote about North Korean operatives getting hired by American companies for Wired. The companies don't like to talk about what is happening. Neither does North Korea. So Bobby relied on defectors who understand how the scam works from North Korea's end. So typically these guys, and they really are guys like you say young, you know, pretty much straight out of college. They are recruited to work in these teams of 10 or 15 people and they basically operate

like a criminal gang in a sort of digital sweatshop. So they are typically sent overseas. I don't think they get many choices, you know, they're sent overseas to live in a nondescript apartment and it's pretty much a 24-7 existence. They work there, they eat there, they sleep there. They are only allowed to leave in small groups to make sure that nobody runs away. And they get paid by the government and sometimes pretty well.

But the regime also makes it clear that, you know that your family back in South Korea is under extra surveillance to try and dissuade people from trying to escape. But these teams are typically relatively low level. North Korea does also run very high level hacking teams And this kind of work is maybe a stepping stone towards that, but it's kind of where folks are paying their dues. Kim Jong-un is a very strange guy. He has interesting priorities. And this now, based on everything you've told us, really does appear to be one of them.

How has he made this kind of cyber training a priority in North Korea? What could you find out about that? Yeah, so Kim Jong-un is a really interesting and strange leader. I mean, we all know kind of how he's behaved when he appears in public and the kind of things that North Korea has been doing with its weapons program and threats against other countries. North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un has ordered his country's military to be ready to use nuclear weapons at any time. North Korea threatening to test two more weapons of mass destruction after a beaming Kim Jong-un

watched the latest missile launch. But unlike his father, who was very kind of anti-technology and school. Kim Jong Un was actually educated in Switzerland under a pseudonym. He was kind of sent to school there and he had access to Western culture and Western technology. And when he took over in the 2010s, as supreme leader, he really switched things around. So North Korea went from a country that that basically had like one pipeline to connect to the internet for years and years and years to a country that saw that maybe its only

options or some of its options involved getting really good at technology. And so he has encouraged and put more money and effort into funding computer science programs and technology literacy in North Korean schools. And that's bubbled up through various universities and colleges that sort of develop people's skills and teach them things. You know, they don't just teach them coding or how to use computers, they teach them how to hack and how to cover their tracks and all of this stuff. And so you get these young men, particularly coming out of college in North Korea, who have been trained for the last few years to really be operatives, you know, to be make it possible for

them to do this stuff. And it's paying dividends for North Korea, you know, for such a small country and one that doesn't have a big technology industry, they punch way above their weight in terms of this stuff. And so there's a lot of cryptocurrency theft going on. Earlier this year, a couple of months ago, a crypto exchange in Dubai got hacked and $1.5 billion got stolen, and that was by North Korean hackers. So these guys have realized that this is a very lucrative way with very low cost to them. Really it's just a computer and some training to get out there and cause havoc and fund the country that has no other way of making money. Do we know how much money this is making?

of making money. Do we know how much money this is making? You know, typically a team of pretenders might earn several million dollars a year through the different jobs that they're running. And I've seen lots of estimates wild all over the place, but the minimum is kind of around three million dollars a year. This is like, that's a lot of money, but it's not, you know, it's not a huge amount, but yeah, obviously the way North Korea operates, they're taking nearly all of that as profit, right? And it's going straight back into military programs, it's going straight back into Kim Jong-un's slush fund,

you know, it's going back into the country and they're running, you know, there are many of these groups running different scams. And scale-wise, you know, there's been a lot of activity in the US, but folks I spoke to are saying that they're seeing a real expansion of activity in Europe, in Japan and elsewhere. So this has now become a very lucrative scheme across the board for the North Koreans. I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of the American who ends up talking to one of these people in North Korea and figures it out and is like, Uh-oh, this person is definitely not in Knoxville. And I wonder what you do about it. Like, you can't call the police and say somebody fraudulently applied for a job at my company. But also, this isn't right. It doesn't seem legal. What can law enforcement and what does law enforcement actually do here?

Yeah, this is really the tough thing in these cases. Because if you're smart enough to spot it before it happens to you, kind of no crime has been really enacted upon you or something that's, you know, not going to lead to a prosecution. But in any case, it's really hard to prosecute these cases, because for the most part, the worst offenders are based in a country that the American courts can't extradite from. So, you know, we're not going to pull someone out of China or Russia. So that means the cases generally focus on the stolen identities and the accomplices. The real problem underneath all of this is that the political or economic solutions that you think would be possible just aren't really effective, right? You can't enact sanctions against North Korea for this because the sanctions already enacted against North Korea are so punitive, right? One of the reasons that these guys are doing this in the first place is because legal trade is basically zero because the country is being punished rightly for its rogue nuclear weapons program. So for now

from the industry and law enforcement folks I spoke to, your best remedy is to try and be aware of it and prevent it happening to you. And that's tough. And it's a big leap to go from saying, you know, there's something fishy going on with this applicant to, I believe this applicant may be working for the North Korean government. That's like, that's a wild jump to make. But at least if you're looking for things, looking for those red flags, or kind of looking for that circumstantial evidence, then you can protect yourself from being a victim.

There is something about all of this, Bobby, that is just not particularly clever. It's working, but you don't have to have a beautiful mind to think up a scam like this one. I wonder though, as you were reporting out this story, where your mind went when you thought about what are the perils in the future that we're facing? What doors are opened by this little scam that five years from now or 10 years from now might be even harder to combat? That I think is the most fascinating question in all of this.

There are two threads that I would pull here. One is that once they can get access, they're stepping stones, right? They're just trying to do a job and earn money, but what if somebody else can use the same techniques and be more aggressive in their attacks? You know, if you get hired, let's say you get hired inside a government defense contractor, you know, can you access intellectual property or state secrets or something like that? The espionage potential is high and the kind of aggressive attacks on companies could get a lot worse. And then I think, you know, the second thread is just that it dramatically undermines trust in everything, right? You know, we already see deep fakes, we already see misinformation, we already see all kinds of ways of making

you not believe the things that you see. And if you can't even believe, sorry, my computer screen just disappeared. I think it went on the screensaver. I'm gonna pick that one up again. This is North Korea, okay. Yeah, I do get paranoid about these things sometimes now. Yeah, I think there is this fundamental problem of eroding trust that you can't believe what your eyes are seeing.

You know, we see deep fakes happening all the time. We see misinformation. We see all these systems working to kind of separate you from reality and try and get you to second guess everything that you see. And that's important. You know, you don't want to fall for tricks but the more prevalent they become the more difficult it is to know what's real and what's not and so if you are you are stuck in a position where you can't be 100% sure that you know the person on your

company team phone call or zoom call who doesn't like to put their camera on and doesn't talk very often but they do the job you know if you start to believe that that person could be an operative of a foreign country then you know you're getting really into some wild places in your thought process and I think that undermining of reality is kind of the biggest existential problem here. And it's one, I don't know that there's a way to solve it, but we can all see that how dangerous it can be to separate you from the truth. Bobby Johnson, investigative reporter. Gabrielle Burbae produced today's show. Amina El-Sadi I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you