Is your new co-worker secretly North Korean?

A new scam – aided by AI and remote work – is letting one of the most sanctioned regimes on Earth sneak tech workers into the American job market. How it works, what they’re like as co-workers, and the stories of the Americans swept up in the scheme. Inside North Korea’s Operation to Conquer the American Job Market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUhdmIFpb-w Send us your questions for our upcoming AMA! mailto:[email protected]?subject=AMA Sign up to become an Incognito Mode member! https://searchengine.supercast.com/#subscribe

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  Hello. Search Engine is going to do, for the very first time, I believe, an 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 at the show to PJvote, V-O-G-T, [email protected]. Subject line AMA. If you would like to send your question as a voice note, you can also do that. All right. Our episode this week, after these ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Bombas. Cozy season is here, which means it's time to bring out the movie marathons, crisp morning

• 0:44PJ Vogt?

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• 1:35PJ Vogt?

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• 2:18PJ Vogt?

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• 3:08PJ Vogt?

  Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. At Search 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. Robots 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?

• 3:47PJ Vogt?

  I suspect that 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 of 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.

• 4:32PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, my name's Sam Kessler. I'm a reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

• 4:49PJ Vogt?

  And what do you normally cover? What's your beat?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  So I, technically, I'm a data reporter, which means doing stories where we try to apply, you know, 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.

• 5:13PJ Vogt?

  Sam is a reporter I met back in the Foxholes. 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 had led him to all this.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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, 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

• 6:18Speaker 01

  on this like 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.

• 6:29PJ Vogt?

  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's 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

• 7:12PJ Vogt?

  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 pilfer documents,

• 7:56PJ Vogt?

  hack your company. He is loyal to Kim Jong-un's regime. He's not loyal to like, whatever your crypto project is.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  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 ended up 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 Earthquakes Tokyo, which is where the workers 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?

• 8:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:13PJ Vogt?

  So, okay, so phase one was crypto. Crypto ends, essentially. I mean, like 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. 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?

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, over the past year, my colleagues, Emma, Bob, and I have been looking at this North Korean IT work problem from a broader 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 the strategy on going back a few years.

• 10:33PJ Vogt?

  So lots of people are working with North Koreans right now?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 10:37PJ Vogt?

  When you were ready to report this story, did you wonder whether anyone at your news organization might be North Korean?

• 10:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:56PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so tell me about how you began to learn about Face2this. Like, what was your window into this world that we would assume we would never get a window into?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  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 Emma Scott, 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. But 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.

• 11:49PJ Vogt?

  Conducting like, job interviews?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Good afternoon, Michael. How are you today?

• 11:54Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  Hello, Derek. How are you? Hello? Yes, this is Derek.

• 11:59PJ Vogt?

  The clips that you're hearing are from the documentary Sam made with his colleagues, Emma Scott and Robert McMillan for The Wall Street Journal. It's called Inside North Korea's Operation to Conquer the American Job Market. You'll hear clips from their reporting throughout this episode.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  Hello?

• 12:13PJ Vogt?

  Hi.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  Hi, nice to meet you. And would you now or in the future require a sponsorship?

• 12:17Speaker 04

  I'm a US citizen.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  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 Meet 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 or in 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, you know, watch anybody do a job interview, let alone like, an undercover North Korean operative. 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.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  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 ChatGPT window in many of these cases.

• 13:20PJ Vogt?

  And what, I have an assumption, but I will ask, what were they doing on ChatGPT during their job interviews?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  You can see that by the time they pulled up this ChatGPT 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.

• 13:42Speaker 05

  Do you have any experience with the Luminous?

• 13:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, of course.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Copy it, paste it into ChatGPT, and then, you know, kind of BS for a couple of seconds while it's loading. And then the worker would just read off the answer.

• 13:57Speaker 06

  I've used it for handling background tasks and triggering workflows and processing API requests in a cost-efficient way.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  But in some cases, the interviewers that we saw interviewing these candidates got a little suspicious.

• 14:12Speaker 05

  Where are you based?

• 14:13Speaker 06

  Ah, I live in Pendsance, you know?

• 14:16Speaker 05

  What's the weather like now?

• 14:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  He kind of just like laughs for a second. And then you see either him or whoever's controlling the computer scrambling to open Google and look up this town where this person claimed to be based.

• 14:44PJ Vogt?

  God.

• 14:44Speaker 05

  Is it cold? Is it warm? What's the temperature right now?

• 14:48Speaker 06

  It's really cold, yeah. About 10 degrees Celsius, yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  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 a fat ugly pig"? Uh, Shinza? Shinza? Sorry, no, Kim Jong-un, you know, the leader of North Korea.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Can you say it?

• 15:36PJ Vogt?

  Because you, North Korea is not a society where you criticize like, the leader leader.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I, 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, they'll just hang up, they'll freeze-

• 15:55PJ Vogt?

  This actually seems to work.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  It seems to actually work. Like, you have to, like, apparently you can't say anything.

• 16:03PJ Vogt?

  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 safety or their families. Fear is gonna make you do the job interview to the best of your ability, but like, fear of insulting-

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:24PJ Vogt?

  -the people of your country might be like, stronger than that.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  And it might even just indicate to the interviewee, like, hey, that, you know, these people know what this is, and I'm not gonna last long here, anyway.

• 16:33PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. Why take the risk? They figured you out.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:37PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  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 under the username Eagle Vision.

• 17:15PJ Vogt?

  Eagle Vision?

• 17:15Speaker 01

  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-

• 17:32PJ Vogt?

  They got a job at Amazon?

• 17:34Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 18:07PJ Vogt?

  It's so crazy. It's so crazy.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 18:12PJ Vogt?

  So through just a few computers' data you were able to find, you see nine hires. Are you able to see whether they're good employees?

• 18:21Speaker 01

  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. They, they were like, "This guy does not have the skills."

• 18:50PJ Vogt?

  Can you say, I am actually a little surprised that the North Korean workers weren't good employees?

• 18:55Speaker 01

  So some of them are. And so that, like, you can't paint it with a broad brush either. Like, this is a huge operation, and you have people, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, somebody who's been coding in the crypto world for like, five or something years.

• 19:40PJ Vogt?

  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, they're taking a shotgun approach at this point.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:49PJ Vogt?

  And why did the father-son company say they had fired their worker? He just didn't know what he was talking about?

• 19:53Speaker 01

  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. In 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.

• 20:07Speaker 07

  Morning, Patrick.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  Morning.

• 20:11Speaker 07

  How's it going?

• 20:12Speaker 04

  Doing, doing a little bit better.

• 20:15PJ Vogt?

  Oh, like, the things aren't going great, chat?

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:17Speaker 07

  If you're gonna have a sick day, you need to tell us before 9:00 AM, because we need to shift everything.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 07

  Not good, man. Yeah, also, I'm still not fully confident about like, your performance. I know you have the expertise, but I'm missing all the kind of like, communication skills.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  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, it was like, a nice class and had a deal with something like that.

• 20:53PJ Vogt?

  Did the North Korean workers seem bummed to be fired, the way anybody would be bummed to be fired?

• 20:57Speaker 01

  So in that case, he was not fired.

• 20:59PJ Vogt?

  He was, he was being reprimanded.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  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?

• 21:14PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:25PJ Vogt?

  But they're operating under tremendous pressure.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Huge pressure, yeah.

• 21:33PJ Vogt?

  So that was the first glimpse Sam got of these North Korean secret IT workers, covertly clocking in and clocking 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 a short break.

• 22:24PJ Vogt?

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• 23:05PJ Vogt?

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• 24:32Speaker 01

  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 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 dorm-style housing, at least in the reports that we've seen, where in many cases, they even have minders, where they're people who are watching them, monitoring them, making sure that they don't deviate from whatever they've been tasked with doing, which is this IT work. Now, there's a varying range in terms of how these workers are treated and how much money they actually get for the work.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  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 our government has linked to missile development and the North Korean weapons program.

• 25:30PJ Vogt?

  That's so crazy. And do you have a sense of how much money this is worth to the North Korean government? How much is coming out of America and going into the regime?

• 25:39Speaker 01

  So, 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. 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.

• 26:11PJ Vogt?

  That's crazy. So, it's like a significant pot of income for that government?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And they've always done stuff like this because they're so heavily sanctioned, they're so 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 a new, supercharged, industrial-scale version of that.

• 26:37PJ Vogt?

  And do you have a sense of, weirdly, North Korea is something that I read a lot about. I've read a lot of the books that are the accounts of defectors. I've read 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 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.

• 27:18PJ Vogt?

  How does the regime keep them from, if you're working out of a dormitory in China or Russia, isn't there just a temptation then to defect? You're aware of how valuable your labor would be if you weren't giving a huge percentage to Kim Jong-un?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  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 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 weird online culture with Lambos and NFTs and just money.

• 28:01PJ Vogt?

  I found crypto to be a second language as an English speaker.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:05PJ Vogt?

  And they're approaching English as a second language, then crypto as a second language within the second language.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's like a language of excess.

• 28:11PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:46PJ Vogt?

  And what I know just from reading is there's so much we know about North Korea, but 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.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so.

• 29:12PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:14PJ Vogt?

  So, okay, so one part of this that is tricky is if you're a North Korean employee, secretly working at an American firm, you still need a place where checks can be sent because you're not in crypto. And you sort of need a mailing address. How do they solve that problem?

• 29:29Speaker 01

  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 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 the jobs, having the North Koreans do the coding and whatnot in the background.

• 30:04PJ Vogt?

  So, you're going to work using your computer, you're playing JavaScript web games, and your work is being done by North Korea?

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 30:11PJ Vogt?

  How do the North Koreans find these Americans? And who are the Americans who choose to do this?

• 30:16Speaker 01

  So, we had the opportunity to interview this man named Derek Goon.

• 30:20Speaker 04

  I'm leery about it at first, but after talking for a little bit back and forth, I was like, you know what, let's give it a shot. Like, lo and behold, it ended up actually doing pretty good. I mean, I've had a passive income for the last year and a half now.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  We learned about Derek Goon because he served as something called a laptop farmer.

• 30:38PJ Vogt?

  A laptop farmer.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  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, there's physical hardware that the North Koreans will use to tap into these computers. But basically, Derek would turn off and on the computer, and the North Koreans would be doing the actual work because they could control it from their end.

• 31:14Speaker 04

  They would schedule up interviews, and then they could sit and do these interviews with them. All I had to do was just show up and land the job. Then you'd get one of those remote laptops sent to you. It's not any more difficult process than that. It's a remote job. I get to live more free, I guess. I can go to school full-time and then still carry this out. It alleviated a lot of stress for me.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Derek is a man who lives in Oak Harbor, Ohio, which is really a lower-income farming town in the outskirts of Toledo. We traveled out there a couple of 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,

• 32:18Speaker 01

  which is the person who led the IT worker cell, the North Korean that we were focused on.

• 32:23PJ Vogt?

  But so this guy is like, he's a guy who could use some money, who among us? And he's online and somebody says, I know a way you can make some money online. I'm just going to introduce you to this guy.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  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 the Wall Street Journal. We're not, you know, going undercover or anything. But regardless, this person essentially walked me through what their pitch looks like.

• 32:48PJ Vogt?

  What does their pitch look like?

• 32:50Speaker 05

  Our developers are very skilled, but this language gap sometimes makes it harder for us to win new projects. That's why we are looking for a floating speaker guest during the interviews.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  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 idea is they'll do the work. And it's really okay because they're still doing the work. It's just-

• 33:26PJ Vogt?

  You'll be the face. And the idea being like-

• 33:27Speaker 01

  You're just helping them out.

• 33:28PJ Vogt?

  We're asking you to do something unusual, but it's to help people in this other country who have expertise, but not great English skills, who Americans feel like a lot of sympathy for. Like, Ukraine is like kind of the opposite in terms of favorability from North Korea.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:41PJ Vogt?

  And so there's a little, like, thin veil of plausible deniability.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. And maybe you, 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?

• 33:59PJ Vogt?

  And how good is the salary for being an American front for a North Korean worker?

• 34:03Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  And it's always the same amount, same salary. This one's a 75K a year salary. So my cut is 50%. I mean, yeah, they're pushing a lot of money. Like, it's a pretty big operation from what I've seen.

• 34:41PJ Vogt?

  He takes half the salary to just show up?

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:44PJ Vogt?

  And then he just sends, somehow he sends the money to his, like, fake Ukrainian, actual North Korean minder? And then they use whatever rails on the internet to get it back to, like, missile development?

• 34:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:09PJ Vogt?

  And did he suspect it wasn't Ukraine?

• 35:12Speaker 01

  He had his suspicions. So he said initially that he thought that they were in Brazil. And he was like, ah, no, you're not. Like, you're not in Brazil.

• 35:24PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  But genuinely, these people were actually based in China. Based on our own research, we were able to track their IPs to Shenyang, which is kind of near the border of North Korea, where a lot of these IT workers are based in China. And he figured, you know, they're Chinese. He knew not everything was on the up and up. But he figured, you know, what he was doing, he didn't believe was, you know, unethical or illegal.

• 35:50Speaker 04

  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.

• 36:00PJ Vogt?

  When you told him, hey, you're not laptop farming for China, you're laptop farming for North Korea, what did he say?

• 36:07Speaker 01

  So at first, when we first spoke to him, he's like, I don't care where anybody's from. Like, it was almost like he thought we were racist-

• 36:17PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  -for suggesting that they were North Korean. But over time, he came to understand, and at a certain point, I think, accept that he was involved in something pretty sketchy.

• 36:32Speaker 04

  My moral compass is starting to lean more towards like, dude, these guys are in a shadier business than I thought. I mean, how the do I get involved in shit like this, man?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  And that it might have involved North Korea.

• 36:43Speaker 04

  Well, when I mentioned something, I was like, yo, dude, you in North Korea? Or something like that. He got really pissed off at me when I said that. He says, no, why would you even think that? And I was like, well, because I got some sources that say you were.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  And I think a big tipping point for him was when he received a 1099 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.

• 37:13PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  It's not a, 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.

• 37:30PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  In order to get these jobs, these North Koreans are sometimes using sort of pseudo, like, sort of witting, unwitting helpers, like a Derek Goon, who was actually willing to interview at jobs under, you know, 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 stealing identities and using those identities to work for jobs.

• 37:57PJ Vogt?

  Good afternoon. Michael Brown. M.I.C.H.A.E.L. Brown. I am 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.

• 38:57PJ Vogt?

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• 39:38PJ Vogt?

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• 40:22PJ Vogt?

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• 41:07PJ Vogt?

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• 42:05PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  So Michael Brown is a man, lives near Atlanta, and his identity was stolen by North Korean IT workers to work at various different jobs.

• 42:20PJ Vogt?

  So does he know how they got it?

• 42:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:52Speaker 05

  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.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  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 heard of, let alone worked for.

• 43:33Speaker 05

  Have you seen his man resume? Oh, my God, have you seen the jobs that I've supposedly worked in the little amount of time they work and how much money they've made? But yeah, here I am. Whole life is just took, somebody else is living like me right now.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:18Speaker 05

  Can't get a bank account. Hell, 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.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  He's had trouble applying for loans, including a college loan for his daughter, which is really a shame. Like, 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.

• 44:56Speaker 05

  The most people can say is, well, yeah, you're gonna have to make some calls and get this fixed. And now you're gonna have to answer a million questions like, you're the one who stole your own identity.

• 45:09Speaker 05

  And it's like, huh, so what do you do at this point?

• 45:13Speaker 01

  It's been over a year and he still hasn't figured out how to, you know, sort of 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 enough to let us, you know, watch as he called one of these companies that supposedly, you know, 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.

• 45:36PJ Vogt?

  It's such hell.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  It's horrible. And there's so many people who are in exactly his position.

• 45:43PJ Vogt?

  And are there consequences for the Americans who, like, are knowing laptop farmers? Like, I imagine you're breaking some laws in doing that.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Yes, it's interesting because we can't arrest North Koreans in North Korea, but also in China, Russia. We don't have extradition treaties with any of these countries where they're, you know, typically basing their workers. So the only thing that law enforcement really can do is go after the Americans who are sort of aiding them, sometimes wittingly, sometimes less wittingly.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  But we interviewed some FBI agents for our reporting, and we even have one of them saying.

• 46:23Speaker 04

  We're under no grand illusion that we're gonna arrest our way out of this problem. Like, law enforcement action alone is not the solution here.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  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 gonna arrest your way out of credit card fraud?

• 46:39PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  It's gonna keep going, and it's gonna morph. And I think that that's what this is.

• 46:45Speaker 04

  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.

• 47:02PJ Vogt?

  What is the thing you're trying to figure out now? Like, 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 has this story been evolving?

• 47:15Speaker 01

  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 to 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 ChatGPT.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  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 face swap programs that have been getting better and better and better to look like a different person or look like a different ethnicity. They're also doing accent swaps. I mean, just deep fake 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 gonna be impossible to discern between an AI deep fake, 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

• 48:42Speaker 01

  and how slash whether it's, you know, possible to detect this as an employer.

• 48:48PJ Vogt?

  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 at 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.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  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 100 different companies using slightly different resumes that don't line up all with one another. You pull all that data together. It's easier to parse out if an applicant who applies to like one of your clients is fake.

• 49:38PJ Vogt?

  It's sort of the kind of algorithmic fraud detection that like a credit card company would normally use. Like, oh, this person doesn't usually use their Visa at a gas station overseas all of a sudden. But now you're just trying to build similar databases and similar recognition systems for job applicants.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:54PJ Vogt?

  It's so crazy. It's so like, it just gives me that feeling that I keep encountering it. Like, we build a very strange world with very strange problems.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just such like a 2026 thing, right?

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:16PJ Vogt?

  Sam 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.

• 51:59PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pennamaneni, who is also our show's editor. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Multer is our producer. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Fact checking this week by Natsumi Ajisaka. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Marandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Morikarin, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. If you have a business and would like to advertise on Search Engine, shoot us an email at [email protected]. Subject line, advertising. It tells us where we take your questions. We're always looking for more questions. If you're a listener and would like to hear a version of our show without any ads that also includes bonus episodes,

• 52:43PJ Vogt?

  you can sign up for incognito mode. You also get access to our strained online experiments, and you'll be first in line for tickets to our live events. You can find a link to subscribe in our show notes or just go to searchengine.show. Your contributions to incognito mode are what help us keep this project running. If you would like another way to support us, you could rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or just follow us on Spotify. That is what the machines want you to do. I don't know why. Thank you, as always, for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.

• 53:25PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by VistaPrint. As a small business owner, running a podcast, I'm always looking for authentic ways to connect with listeners, which makes VistaPrint such a valued expert partner for us. I was on their site the other day, brainstorming new things we could make for our show, and the creative momentum took over. I ended up designing Search Engine stickers, and I tried to make a sign for our office. When your physical branding looks this sharp and professional, it immediately communicates credibility and shows your audience that you mean business. VistaPrint truly helps every dollar go further, delivering premium quality and design support that make your company look established without breaking the bank. Whether you need your design tweaked or a total rebrand, VistaPrint has you covered with the expert service small businesses deserve.

• 54:09PJ Vogt?

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