US officials say they’ve delivered a major hit to one of North Korea’s stealthiest moneymakers: remote tech jobs at American companies. Officials say the FBI last month broke up more than 40 “laptop farms” in Texas and seized nearly 200 devices used by North Korean IT workers posing as Americans, part of what authorities describe as a key funding stream for Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs, the New York Times reports.
“Increasingly, North Korean IT workers are turning to recruiting American facilitators to counter improved private sector detections and law enforcement actions,” the Justice Department said. “These workers are hiring facilitators to complete a wider variety of tasks, and in some cases subcontracting entire jobs to third-party foreign nationals.” Prosecutors also unsealed charges in Ohio against two US citizens and 10 China-based North Koreans, accusing them of stealing identities to secure jobs at about 70 US firms and pulling in more than $3 million between 2019 and 2025.
The FBI says thousands of workers controlled by Pyongyang are employed by Western firms, posing “a significant national security and intellectual property theft insider threat,” TechCrunch reports. Adam Meyers at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which worked closely with the FBI on the investigation, tells the Times that North Korean efforts to get hired for IT jobs have been “increasing both in prevalence and complexity.” The North Koreans have been using stolen American identities, AI tools, and fake social media profiles, investigators say.