FBI: Thousands of remote IT workers sent wages to North Korea

Posted this on Reddit:

This is a legit problem. They pose as American citizens or permanent residents. Sometimes even using a VPN into the US. HR folks would not catch on.

I’ve actually interviewed two of these people over the years. They somehow got through the initial screenings.

It’s a bizarre experience. Most of the time there is a significant delay with silence between your question and their answer. It’s as if they’re being fed the perfect answer. Problem is they could never answer or pretended to not understand any follow-up questions.

You could always hear others in the background. One time I was given an answer that I had heard someone else in the room give just 2 minutes before.

The question that really solidified my hunch was about their location. The applicants would always claim to be from a very small town. In my two experiences I happened to know a lot about those towns. The first said they “really enjoyed the mountains” when I asked what brought them to a Houston suburb. When I asked the other applicant if they had any damage from the hurricane that went through St. Augustine, FL, they replied “What hurricane?”

Now, neither of these people would have been hired even if they had stellar interviews as we do make use of background checks and verification services. This scheme really only works for third-party dev shops or desperate small companies.

I’m glad this problem is getting more attention.

This is not about W-2 remote workers, these are about offshore/onshore consultancies that hire supposedly Russian/Chinese freelancers to work, and instead these were North Koreans who then used remote access to corporate for data exfiltration and other hacking activity

The RTO propaganda is getting pretty intense

Most of my teams over the past 12 years were remote and doing programming or related work. Well over 100 people across multiple companies. We met online, often, but not always, using video, and almost all of them participated in annual on-sites.

It’s hard to imagine how any of them could possibly be North Korean agents.

While I don’t doubt that some companies did end up inadvertently hiring North Korean agents, the following quote form the article sounds like scaremongering against offshoring:

| Greenberg said any company that hired freelance IT workers “more than likely” hired someone participating in the scheme

I already send 30% to 50% of my wage to help pay for my government's weapons programs...

Here it's called taxes.

You don't have to be remote to do this. You are set up to be able to work remotely no matter what in my experience, even when the office was king.

And yes, I say was.

Why didn't they use employee verification services? Or maybe someone should provide that as a service for remote workers only? Edit: I think usually such services are employment verification, but with better ways to fake being someone else person verification may need to be a thing for all types of jobs.

The firms and their owners who hired these people should feel some pain, they chose to cut corners and hire offshore with the lowest due diligence possible.

I suppose the owners of the people running our country and the sponsors of our nation state (corporate oligarch)have some stakes in downtowns after all and only would like to prop it up for their own sake bringing all the plebs back to downtowns. All those talks about pollution control and saving Mother Earth is second to their moral high horse. So much for “we the people!”. While also actively sponsoring policies that destroy the liveability and safety of downtowns. Most downtowns are ghost towns now if you haven’t noticed.

Does anyone has a North Korean coworkers?

When the idiots say crypto is only for bad actors, just link this article.

Ah so this is the new angle we're taking to prevent remote work or intense surveillance of remote workers?

Remind me to register my office commute with the office us gov confidant to validate I'm working in America next time...