Two Americans sentenced for helping North Korea steal $5 million in fake IT worker scheme
Two U.S. citizens were sentenced to seven and a half to nine years in prison for their roles in a scheme to help the North Korean government place remote IT workers at American companies.
US Department of Justice on Wednesday announced The sentencing of Kejia Wang and Zhenxing Wang, both New Jersey residents. The two were accused of providing the infrastructure for the fraud scheme, specifically operating or managing so-called “laptop farms” within the United States that allowed North Koreans to connect to laptops and pose as living and working in the country.
The plan saved North Korea about $5 million. That incident also involved co-conspirators who stole the identities of more than 80 Americans and obtained jobs at more than 100 U.S. companies, including some Fortune 500 companies, according to the Justice Department. This allowed North Korean IT workers to not only collect salaries but also, in some cases, steal trade secrets and source codes, the Justice Department said.
“This subterfuge unwittingly placed North Korean IT workers on U.S. company payrolls and U.S. computer systems, thereby harming our national security,” John A. Eisenberg, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for Homeland Security, said in the announcement.
Prosecutors said that between 2021 and 2024, Kejia worked with the conspirators to oversee the operation of laptop farms consisting of hundreds of computers, while Zhenxing kept laptops in his home. The duo also set up shell companies with financial accounts linked to fake IT employees to later transfer millions of dollars in payments abroad. “For their services, Kejia Wang, Zhenxing Wang, and four other U.S. facilitators received approximately $700,000 for their respective roles in the program,” the Justice Department announced.
In one case, fake IT employees managed to steal export-controlled data from an unnamed California-based AI company, according to the Department of Justice.
US government also announced Reward of up to $5 million for information that could help counter these schemes, including data on nine people who allegedly worked with Kejia and Zhenxing.
This is the latest legal action against North Korea’s far-reaching scheme to recruit fake IT workers. to be hired with hundreds of Together with American and Western companies Last year there were major crypto thefts worth over $2 billionThe North Korean government uses such fraud to finance its regime and weapons program under heavy sanctions that isolate it from most of the world economy.
To counter this threat, some companies and recruiters have come up with creative strategies, such as asking suspicious North Koreans to insult Kim Jong-Un, which is illegal in the country. In a recent job interview video that went viralThe applicant can be seen acting clumsily after interviewers asked him to say “Kim Jong Un is a fat, ugly pig.” Finally he hung up the call.
