A federal court in St Louis has indicted 14 North Koreans for allegedly being part of a long-running conspiracy aimed at extorting funds from US companies and funneling money to Pyongyang’s weapons programmes.

The wider scheme allegedly involves thousands of North Korean IT workers who use false, stolen, and borrowed identities from people in the US and other countries to get hired and work remotely for US firms.

The indictement says the defendants and others working with them generated at least $88m (£51.5m) for the North Korean regime over a six-year period.

[…]

The prosecutors say the suspects worked for two North Korean-controlled companies - China-based Yanbian Silverstar and Russia-based Volasys Silverstar.

[…]

  • rtc@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    11 days ago

    From the article

    They would then instruct those US residents to install remote access software allowing them to appear to be working from the US when they were actually overseas.

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but North Korean civilians have no access to internet.

      • rtc@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        10 days ago

        There’s a height of feigned ignorance. There’s no chance the money goes anywhere than directly to the military government. Not to “families”.

        • MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          10 days ago

          … and? Yeah, welcome to the thread. At what point do I say otherwise?

          Starving the regime is not an excuse to starve the country. The regime doing anything that brings in more money than it spends is a better use of its time than other things it tries to do, and will continue attempting regardless of cash-flow.

          Call me when you’re ready to impiment a no-fly zone and mass air-dropping/smuggling of Starlink, Cell Phones, Cell Towers(stand-alone, like the Stinger, only in reverse), weapons, and most importantly, food.

          Are you ready to do something about the problem of starving North Koreans, or do we just continue blaming it entirely on their government?

          … yeah, that will show them. Meanwhile, do you even begin to understand how food is distributed within North Korea?

          India and Pakistan, circa 1998 … You’re telling us the world ended because we didn’t starve them all out.