Amazon tells North Koreans, you have no career here. In the UK, this is the Marketplace Morning

Report from the BBC World Service. I'm Gideon Long. Good morning. The tech giant Amazon says

it's blocked more than 1,800 North Koreans from trying to join the company in the past two years.

Amazon's chief security officer said North Koreans

often try to get hired and then send wages back to fund their government's weapons programs.

The BBC's Surinjana Tuari has the details from Singapore. Hi, Surinjana. Hi there. Tell us more,

Surinjana. Yeah, this has come from Amazon's chief security officer, Stephen Schmidt, who wrote it in a LinkedIn post.

And he basically said that the US technology giant has seen an upsurge in the number of job applications from suspected North Korean agents.

Now, they were trying to apply for remote working IT jobs using stolen or fake identities.

And apparently their objective is typically straightforward to get hired, to get paid,

and funnel wages back to fund the regime's weapons programs. That's according to Stephen Schmidt.

Now, he added that this is actually likely to be happening, not just in Amazon,

but at scale across the industry, especially in the United States.

And the way that it works is they rely on something called laptop farms,

which is basically working with people who are using computers

based in the US, but are run remotely from outside of the country.

Right. And how common is this then? And are other tech companies worried, given what Amazon

has been saying? Yeah, well, Mr Schmidt has sounded the alarm. He's shown a spotlight on

Amazon's issue and said it is prevalent across the tech industry, probably. There have been a few

cases that show that this is happening. In June, for example, the US government said it had

uncovered 29 laptop firms that were being operated illegally across the country by North Korean

IT workers. And they also used stolen or forged identities of Americans to help these North Korean

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