North Korean charged with $88 million in identity theft and extortion

The Ministry of Justice accused 14 North Korean nationals of conspiring to make use of false identities to get IT jobs at U.S. firms and siphon a reimbursement to their home country, in violation of U.S. sanctions.

The AccusationThe lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court in Missouri, alleged that the conspiracy netted no less than $88 million between April 2017 and March 2023.

All 14 defendants are charged with conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering and identity theft. Eight of the conspirators are also charged with aggravated identity theft.

If convicted, the conspirators each withstand 27 years in prison, the Justice Department said. All 14 are listed as “Wanted by the FBI.”

In some cases, they increased their revenue by stealing confidential company information and forcing employers to pay extortion payments to forestall its release, the DOJ said.

To hide their identities from U.S. employers, the conspirators applied for jobs using stolen identities of Americans, prosecutors said. They also allegedly paid Americans to remotely attend job interviews and work meetings under fake identities, and so they registered web domains and designed fake web sites to trick potential employers.

Some of the web sites must have “raised suspicion” in regards to the candidates, the DOJ said in a news release.

For example, a number of the web sites contained garbled nonsense, equivalent to: “Besides, there is no one who loves pain because it is pain, pursues it, wants to win it, but,” the federal government said.

The conspirators allegedly worked for 2 North Korean-controlled firms, Yanbian Silverstar and Volasys Silverstar, based in China and Russia, respectively. The US Treasury Department has previously sanctioned each firms.

The State Department said Thursday it was making a proposal available a reward of as much as $5 million for information in regards to the conspirators and others related to the 2 “North Korean front companies.”

The two firms employed no less than 130 people, but there are lots of more pursuing the identical goal: evading sanctions to generate revenue for the country's ruling regime, the DOJ said.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Ashley Johnson, special agent accountable for the FBI’s St. Louis field office, said of the case unveiled Thursday.

“The North Korean government has trained and deployed thousands of IT employees to carry out the same schemes against U.S. companies every day,” Johnson said.

“To prop up its brutal regime, the North Korean government directs IT employees to use fraud to gain employment, steal sensitive information from U.S. companies, and funnel money back into the DPRK,” Assistant Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in the discharge.

“This indictment of 14 North Korean nationals exposes their alleged sanctions evasion and should serve as a warning to businesses around the world – beware of this malicious activity by the North Korean regime,” Monaco said.