- Fortune 500 companies have unwittingly hired thousands of software engineers who claim to be American developers but are actually North Korean citizens using stolen or fake identities. Through legitimate employment, the IT workers are illegally funneling their salaries to Kim Jong Un’s regime to fund prohibited weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs. The U.S. Treasury, State Department, and FBI collectively estimate the IT workers scam has generated hundreds of millions each year since 2018.
About 95% of the résumés Harrison Leggio gets in response to job postings for his crypto startup g8keep are from North Korean engineers pretending to be American, the founder estimates. He even once interviewed a job seeker who claimed to have worked at the same Manhattan-based cryptocurrency exchange as he did, during the time he worked there.
