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Identities of More Than 80 Americans Stolen for North Korean IT Worker Scams


The US Justice Department revealed the identity theft number along with one arrest and a crackdown on “laptop farms” that allegedly facilitate North Korean tech worker impersonators across the US.

On Monday, the Department of Justice announced a sweeping operation to crack down on US-based elements of the North Korean remote IT workers scheme, including indictments against two Americans who the government says were involved in the operations—one of whom the FBI has arrested. The DOJ’s announcement and indictments also reveal how the North Koreans didn’t merely create fake IDs to insinuate themselves into Western tech firms, according to authorities, but allegedly stole the identities of “more than 80 US persons” to impersonate them in jobs at more than a hundred US companies and funnel money to the Kim regime. In that instance, the government claims the North Korean impersonators also accessed and likely stole technical data, including some information sensitive enough to be protected under the export controls known as the International Trafficking in Arms Regulations, or ITAR.

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