Could your colleague be a North Korean in disguise?

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2025

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Recently several videos from recruiters on LinkedIn have gone viral. The videos appear to show recruiters conducting routine job interviews over a video call, but something is up with the candidates. Their faces are blurred, and they appear to be using some sort of a filter. After some strange interaction with the recruiter, they drop off the call. But these creepy videos are not isolated incidents – many recruiters are reporting that this has happened to them multiple times. Who are these candidates really? We expose the phenomenon of North Korean IT workers applying for remote tech jobs in the US, and how this has become a significant revenue raising scheme for Kim Jong Un’s regime. The FBI believes thousands of North Koreans have made millions of dollars using fake, stolen or borrowed identities to work remotely. And now, there is evidence that the scheme is expanding into Europe. This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from BBC Trending in-depth reporting on the world of social media.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Your avatar is kind of weird.
0:04.8	Like, are you using something to, like, change your camera view?
0:08.7	You're listening to a recording of David Machado.
0:12.2	He's conducting a remote job interview for a position in his cyber security firm.
0:16.5	Can you take your hand and put it, front of your face to cover it partially?
0:22.6	But David can tell that something's not right.
0:25.2	The candidate appears to be using a filter to disguise their face, and they sound strange.
0:30.6	They asked David if his requests are a joke.
0:33.6	No, no, it's not a joke because I can see that you're using some kind of software.
0:37.4	The candidate refuses to put his hand in front of his face. No, no, it's not a joke because I can see that you're using some kind of software.
0:40.2	The candidate refuses to put his hand in front of his face.
0:43.3	No, no, like put it like this in front of your face.
0:46.5	If you don't do it, we'll end the conversation right now.
0:48.1	David ends the call.
0:53.0	He was startled by the experience when it happened in March this year.
0:56.7	But this wasn't the first time something like this had happened to his company.
1:00.8	His co-founder Claudia had experienced something similar last year.
1:04.4	My first instinct was, wow, okay, like it happened again.
1:05.6	Like, what do I do now?
1:08.7	And I thought, okay, this time I will record it.
1:13.0	Because when the first incident happened, nobody believed us.
1:15.5	People thought that we were joking.
	...

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