Dang, that's wild.
I'm still not going back to the office.
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Technology
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"If you refuse to return to the office, we will assume you work on behalf of North Korean intelligence, and will be monitored by our WFH bots. Please keep your curtains open."
So this is how the government is going to try and brow beat us back to the office?
It sounds like the companies did a shitty job of hiring and didn’t confirm that these people weren’t spies.
That would require a background investigation along the lines of one the US government conducts for SECRET clearances and above. This was the private sector, not even government contracting. HR isn't going to probe anybody's background that deeply (and even basic tradecraft training would hide any of the signs from them).
Is it the employer’s responsibility to determine that somebody is or is not a spy? Like the scam here was to do the actual job and send money back, not to steal company information etc. companies have legal obligations to make sure people are authorized to work in the US etc, but the government sets those standards. If you’ve got convincing enough paperwork, it’s the governments job to enforce this stuff, not the employer.
That said, I’ve interviewed several remote people who were clearly using fake identities and also clearly didn’t have the skills for the job. Seems obvious their scam was to just collect a paycheck doing nothing, so if that’s the same group, then the employers bear some fault for hiring unqualified people… but on the other hand if the North Koreans were actually doing the jobs they were paid for, no reason the company should care.
Federal authorities say that thousands of information technology workers contracting with U.S. companies secretly sent millions of dollars of their wages to North Korea for use in its ballistic missile program
The workers used various techniques to make it look like they were working in the U.S., including paying Americans to use their home Wi-Fi connections
Greenberg said any company that hired freelance IT workers “more than likely” hired someone participating in the scheme.
“We can tell you that there are thousands of North Korea IT workers that are part of this,” spokeswoman Rebecca Wu said.
Wow this is so much bigger than I initially thought. Just how many companies were duped into hiring North Koreans?
lol and lmao
Before reading the article, I just assumed that N. Korea had hacked a game with loot boxes.
Court documents allege that North Korea’s government dispatched thousands of skilled IT workers to live primarily in China and Russia with the goal of deceiving businesses from the U.S. and elsewhere into hiring them as freelance remote employees. The workers used various techniques to make it look like they were working in the U.S., including paying Americans to use their home Wi-Fi connections
Dang what kind of Wi-Fi Access point are they using to reach from the US to China.