Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
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Title: Five People Plead Quilty To Helping North Koreans Infiltrate US
Companies

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/11/14/21432...

"Within the past year, stories have been posted on Slashdot about people
helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs at U.S. corporations, companies
knowingly assisting them, how not to hire a North Korean for a remote IT job,
and how a simple question tripped up a North Korean applying for a remote IT
job," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "The FBI is even warning
companies that North Koreans working remotely can steal source code and
extort money from the company -- money that goes to fund the North Korean
government. Now, five more people have plead guilty to knowingly helping
North Koreans infiltrate U.S. companies as remote IT workers." TechCrunch
reports: The five people are accused of working as "facilitators" who helped
North Koreans get jobs by providing their own real identities, or false and
stolen identities of more than a dozen U.S. nationals. The facilitators also
hosted company-provided laptops in their homes across the U.S. to make it
look like the North Korean workers lived locally, according to the DOJ press
release. These actions affected 136 U.S. companies and netted Kim Jong Un's
regime $2.2 million in revenue, said the DOJ. Three of the people -- U.S.
nationals Audricus Phagnasay, Jason Salazar, and Alexander Paul Travis --
each pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy. Prosecutors
accused the three of helping North Koreans posing as legitimate IT workers,
whom they knew worked outside of the United States, to use their own
identities to obtain employment, helped them remotely access their company-
issued laptops set up in their homes, and also helped the North Koreans pass
vetting procedures, such as drug tests. The fourth U.S. national who pleaded
guilty is Erick Ntekereze Prince, who ran a company called Taggcar, which
supplied to U.S. companies allegedly "certified" IT workers but whom he knew
worked outside of the country and were using stolen or fake identities.
Prince also hosted laptops with remote access software at several residences
in Florida, and earned more than $89,000 for his work, the DOJ said. Another
participant in the scheme who pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud
conspiracy and another count of aggravated identity theft is Ukrainian
national Oleksandr Didenko, who prosecutors accuse of stealing U.S. citizens'
identities and selling them to North Koreans so they could get jobs at more
than 40 U.S. companies. According to the press release, Didenko earned
hundreds of thousands of dollars for this service. Didenko agreed to forfeit
$1.4 million as part of his guilty plea. The DOJ also announced that it had
frozen and seized more than $15 million in cryptocurrency stolen in 2023 by
North Korean hackers from several crypto platforms.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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