This week, federal prosecutors charge four North Korean nationals with scheming to get hired

by a U.S. company as remote workers and then steal nearly $1 million in cryptocurrency.

It's a relatively new North Korean threat operatives using fake IDs and credentials to infiltrate

American businesses.

Freelance investigative reporter Bobby Johnson explained how and why they're doing it in a Wired Magazine article headlined, North Korea stole your job.

Bobby, it's more than jobs that North Korea is after.

Why are they doing this?

So the reason for this scam is really to earn money from well-compensated jobs in the US and in the West

and send it straight back to Kim Jong-un and his regime to fund various things from the nuclear

weapons program to his personal slush fund and other government operations.

North Korea is really under

pressure because of sanctions, so they can't make money through normal means. But really, they also

access computer systems, steal data, potentially plant malware or other dangerous software so that

they can, in the future, do ransomware attacks, as we've seen in the past.

And what kind of jobs are we talking about and what kind of companies?

As we all saw from the pandemic, a lot of jobs went remote.

But one of the widest ranging is software engineering.

And so this is a place where people are very used to over a long period of time for hiring remote workers who get the job done, they're coding websites, they're building apps, they're making, kind of

doing all the IT and technical stuff. And so these are really the target jobs for these operatives.

In job interviews, how do these guys disguise who they really are and where they really are?

Yeah, so we'll go through the scam a little bit.

So what they do is, first of all, they steal an identity.

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