North Korean IT professionals are «renting» foreigners’ LinkedIn, Fiverr, and Upwork accounts to work for foreign companies on their behalf, while collecting data and generating revenue for the country’s budget.
North Korean IT professionals are «renting» foreigners’ LinkedIn, Fiverr, and Upwork accounts to work for foreign companies on their behalf, while collecting data and generating revenue for the country’s budget.
IT specialists from North Korea «rent» the identities of foreigners to work in foreign companies
According to a Fortune investigation, North Korea is heavily using its IT professionals to earn foreign currency by working on popular job search platforms such as LinkedIn, Fiverr and Upwork. To work on such platforms or be hired by a foreign company, an employee must pass a verification stage, so North Korean engineers often recruit foreign accomplices as fake employees.
Cybersecurity expert Aidan Rainey posed as such an accomplice, agreeing to work with North Korean IT professionals to learn the ins and outs of the scheme. Incidentally, such activities have earned North Korea hundreds of millions of dollars, according to US government estimates.
The plan was for North Korean partners to do most of the technical work using remote access tools, while Aidan would handle the public part — attending meetings and conferences where direct communication with the employer was required.
The North Korean operatives created a fake LinkedIn profile for their foreign accomplice and applied for jobs. They altered Aiden’s photo so that he would not be recognized when compared to other photos online.
The character was created by an experienced GIS developer whose portfolio includes successfully developing an ambulance app that tracks the location of ambulances.
About four DPRK specialists who communicated with Aidan from a single person named «Ben» were to receive 70% of their salaries in the form of cryptocurrency transfers or via PayPal or Payoneer.
«They’re actually doing all the work,» Aidan Rainey said. «They were trying to use my real identity to get past the checks, they wanted it to be very similar to my real identity.»
The Ben team even managed to successfully interview for a private US government contractor. They used remote access to a computer and wrote text responses to the employer’s questions in Notepad, which Aidan then spoke. The company offered a full-time position with the possibility of remote work, with a salary of $80,000 per year.
After that, Rainey immediately stopped the experiment and terminated the agreement with the company, explaining that he could not accept the offer.
According to the U.S. Treasury Department, North Korean IT professionals earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the regime in this way. Individual IT professionals can earn up to $300,000 a year working remotely for international companies. Much of this money is funneled through complex chains of shell companies to circumvent international sanctions.
