The Justice Department said on Monday that it had seized hundreds of computers and accused 13 people of tricking US companies into paying salaries to North Korea.
In a new indictment filed in Massachusetts federal court, prosecutors alleged that conspirators fooled over 100 American firms in Washington, D.C., and 27 states.
These firms weren’t named, but authorities said they include Fortune 500 companies and a defense contractor in California with access to sensitive military technology files.
Investigators detailed an elaborate scheme where at least two US citizens worked with North Korean state actors from 2021 to 2024 to steal identities, use them to get people hired in American industries, and then siphon their salaries to Pyongyang.
“These schemes target and steal from US companies and are designed to evade sanctions and fund the North Korean regime’s illicit programs, including its weapons programs,” John Eisenberg, assistant attorney general in the National Security Division, said in a Monday statement.
First, the conspirators used online background check services to obtain the personal data of over 80 Americans, the Justice Department said.
Using that data, they created fake identities for a network of Chinese and Taiwanese people who lived outside America but posed as US-based IT workers or software engineers looking for remote jobs.
Authorities said that once hired, the scammers would ask their employers to send work laptops to homes in New Jersey, New York, and California.
But these homes were actually “laptop farms,” where the computers were plugged into hard drives that gave user access to IT workers in North Korea, per the Justice Department.
At least 29 suspected laptop farms in 16 states were raided by US law enforcement, the department said in its statement.
Prosecutors alleged that Wang Zhengxing, one of the US citizens named in the indictment, hosted one of such laptop farm and created shell companies, such as a fake “VC-backed startup” called Tony WKJ, to receive the fake workers’ salaries.
The money was then sent to North Korea-controlled accounts. Wang has been arrested and faces charges in the five-count indictment, alongside eight other Chinese and Taiwanese citizens. The other US citizen named in court documents, Kejia Wang, is at large.
The Justice Department said both men and four other unnamed partners working in the US received at least $696,000 in total from North Korea for their services.
Four North Koreans were named in a separate criminal indictment filed in the Northern District Court of Georgia, which accused them of posing as US-based workers and laundering their salaries.
They’re also accused of stealing data and cryptocurrency from their employers, then lying about the theft.
“How many times do I need to tell you??? I didn’t do it!!! It’s not me!!!” one of the fake workers wrote in a Telegram message to one of these companies in 2022, per the Justice Department.
The US has been trying to crack down on what it warns is a wide-scale, concerted effort by North Korea to dupe American firms into hiring its IT workers to fund Pyongyang’s government.
For years, the FBI and the Justice Department have said the fraud could involve thousands of North Korean workers farming millions of dollars for weapons and missile programs.
Other major indictments include the charging of an Arizona woman who was accused in May 2024 of helping North Koreans find work with over 300 companies in the US.
