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I agree - this is closer to bonded labor though the paying employer doesn't know it. Instead most of their earnings go to their actual employer (which is the North Korean state). "slave" maybe is more appropriate? "prisoner"?

Advanced Persistent Coworker

"Fake" seems fine. If I buy a fake watch, that might mean that it's a real watch that does its job of telling time, but it says "Rolex" on the front and that's a lie.

The implication is that they're pretending to be legitimate employees whereas they are actually exfiltrating IP from a hostile nation state. Seems valid.

Who cares what they're called. Main concern in this case is that the result of their work poses danger to the US. Like a spies. They often do legit work and meanwhile some "extra"

I agree that fake is an odd word to describe this. Most likely much of our IT infrastructure is extremely compromised. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the major password/healthcare/etc... leaks in the past 6 years were the result of someone "accidentally" setting a cloud bucket to public.

I actually turned down a fly-to-texas for an in person interview about a year back, but I do think in the age of the internet if we don't sacrifice some of the things we have taken for granted in the past, we're going to lose our country. Perhaps there should be a law that requires a picture of any employee standing next to their boss for continued employment - at some point in the future. (this is just an idea, not to start a flamewar, don't attack the specific idea, but attack the idea of some kind of extra checking if you don't agree with it)

I don't think we have a word for this. At best, it is disingenuous work.

It's North Korea though and they're all eViL. Imagine a world where the U.S lifted sanctions on N.K. traded with them and stopped crying about losing a war 70 years ago. Ah well a boy can dream.

Edit: Lol saying anything positive about North Korea on hacker news and people instantly freak out. This fucking website man. North Korea isn't what I would call a free society but it's also not the hell on earth that most liberals want you to think it is. So much of the misery that normal North Koreans have to face is because of western imposed sanctions. We've tried punishing them for 30 years now, it hasn't destroyed the regime if anything they double down. I guess it's easy for a bunch of overfed over paid tech workers to not feel any kind of solidarity for a North Korean though and insist on punishing them even more. Hell the North Korean government would even be open for this kind of agreement if we would actually guarantee their sovereignty, sadly trusting the United States of America to hold up any kind of deal you make with them is fucking impossible.

Here is a quote I came up with but is attributed to Henry Kissinger

Having the United States as your enemy is dangerous, but having them as your friend is fatal.

That old bag liked it so much he had no problem taking credit for it.

Frankly sounds like many "real" candidates I've interviewed.

The tenuous grasp of spoken English despite a degree taught in English is also not unusual.

Setting aside the fraud for a moment (which is an insurmountable barrier to employeeing them).

To some extent I'd be satisfied if they actually had a degree and were productive. They obviously need good enough receptive and written English to work.

Especially if they are earning 5k per year as the title suggests.

Nothing about that sound fake

This might include people working in lumber camps in places like Siberia, "mercenaries" in Ukraine, people in NK-managed restaurants in China, Laos etc, or similar efforts that have been reported on, where the average revenue per worker is likely a lot lower.

Maybe some of them don't remain employed for very long.

It would be ironic if the DPRK just passes on more of the money than most contract software companies.

I had the same thought - I guess there's additional overhead in paying the in-country proxy and probably also a lot of churn (being found out and fired, and then taking a long time to find another position).

The point is that there are legit American citizens who are in on the con. They have real SSNs and an actual presence in the US. They run proxy servers out of their house to make it seem like that's where their web traffic is coming from. From the company's perspective, everything seems like a regular remote employee.

BuT They"Re sO cHeAp!

And it still doesn't come close to the value provided to the company

Reminds me of the Key & Peele sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM

> Once employed in a full-time role, fake workers are often very successful, since they sometimes have multiple people helping them to produce their work, with the hope of getting a promotion and gaining more privileged access to the IT systems.

I think the "fake" part is the long term play to get enough privilege to presumably perform a cybersecurity attack. But less "fake" and more "spy" from the description - the outlined scheme is literally what spies agencies do.

I would say they are "fake" because they work using stolen identities and hide their location. In order to receive these high wages they need to pretend to be located in US and they need to provide the paperwork showing they have a right to work there.

Well, it sounds like they are effectively slaves to the government, who is raking in their income on their behalf, and would presumably be able to "activate" them as an insider threat at some point.

Well, it is (highly) illegal for them to do this. So they presumably lie about everything, like name, location, ...

Perhaps fake is not the correct word, but the actual individuals are likely to have more than a few faked details. They do exist, of course.

It's also very dubious becuase, well, would you really hire a worker from an organization that also does things like hack hospitals and then hold systems hostage for bitcoin?

In North Korea that's likely a lot of money. They probably get paid a lot less than that and Kim pockets the rest.

Camera zooms in from the bottom of the keyboard

https://youtu.be/7HWfwLBqSQ4?si=LmKuVBRVQ0y03prP&t=52

I mean, if the North Korean employees are doing good work, the companies employing them aren't exactly incentivized to find out that they're really North Koreans, cuz then they have an obligation to fire their actually productive employee.

>why is it so difficult to meet them once (somewhere outside of North Korea and China)? The cost is negligible compared to a large salary.

It wouldn't matter. They'd hire some actor to do it. If you insist that they take precautions to be sure the person in the video interview looks like the guy they meet, they'll do that too... but the one doing the work will do so remotely from Pyongyang. There might be technology fixes for this, but they almost certainly involve isolating the United States' internet from most of the rest of the world.

They aren't just perceived as being the villain; they are the villain. They will copy your corporate data and exploit it in multiple ways. They will steal your corporate funds. As an aside, they also do significant cryptocurrency theft.

It's not the lack of oil that enabled this. The west* fought a bloody war to defeat North Korea. We just didn't win (though we did prevent the north from taking the south...). Now you've got a dictatorship protected by their ability to deal devastating damage to South Korea via nukes, huge stockpiles of conventional artillery (and Seoul is within range), etc. Moreover one backed by a superpower (China, and before China the soviet union... indeed these countries are the reason the west didn't win the first war as well).

They could have all the oil in the world and we'd be no more in a position to do anything about it.

*US, Uk, Australia, Netherlands, Canada, France, New Zealand, Phillipines, Tukey, Thailand, South Africa, Greece, Belgum, Luxembourg, Ethopia, Columbia, and South Korea.

Seeing what China next door has done with solar and batteries, I wonder if they'll do an electric end-run around oil, similarly to some places in Africa.

> hundreds stave to death there daily

Yeah, you will need a solid source for that.

This isn't the 1990s, while malnutrition may happen, and there have been occasional shortages (covid was one example), it's unlikely people are starving to death in 2026, let alone multiple, let alone per day.

On top of that: North Korea is not that isolated as people think. North Koreans have smartphones and plenty of those living near the chinese border have chinese sim cards. Ever wondered why defectors say they regularly phone their family? Because virtually every north korean knows somebody with a chinese phone.

Of course flow of information outside is still tightly controlled and such, but there's zero direct evidence for starvation happening.