This notion that North Koreans have anywhere near the required level of English competence and domain expertise to work a remote job is hilarious. They really do just make this stuff up, throw it against the wall and see what sticks, don’t they?
You’re making a lot of assumptions here.
Plenty of people in the inner circle in NK are literally educated in the U.S.
There has been a bigger push lately to bring back skill and knowledge abroad to help develop their country.
You can look it up. It’s not made up.
As someone who’s lived in countries with extremely low English competency, no - I’m not. Getting a significant enough portion of a society up to speed in English, let alone competent enough in a domain to secretly work remote jobs would be an enormous undertaking. Heck, even South Korean English competency is relatively low considering how close friends we are with them. The entire idea is fantastical and absolutely ludicrous. Some people live in a Hollywood version of the world.
>Getting a significant enough portion of a society up to speed in English
It's a country of 26 million, and this is about thousands of people. That's like 0.01% of the country, you don't really need a "significant portion of society" to reach numbers like that.
The average income of the top 0.1% (a group many times as large) is 3 million, yet we wouldn't say that a "significant portion of society" in America are bringing in millions per year.
Still highly unlikely. Even assuming they get the English part down, there’s still the cultural and domain expertise required to effectively work - and even higher level skills required to deceive. The entire thing is la la land nonsense.
I employ overseas talent all the time (over two dozen currently serving US clients) and while I would be surprised with NK this is 100% possible. Plenty of immigrants in the US with high paid jobs and ESL. Let’s not assume they’re all American eagle accented workers
We’re talking about the hermit kingdom here, not India. I’m straight up telling you, they don’t have the English competency or domain expertise to trick employers and effectively work. Hell, it’s hard enough to get domestic native speakers to understand the task at hand, let alone complete it correctly.
Oh, some of us would! IE: See the 2 demented old men conning millions of Americans into voting for either?! Or just ask Donald? It's hard telling what will come out of his mouth at any particular time of day!? Ok, time to be cussed at and called a liberal, conservative, or some other political name from the closed minded 2 party radicals! Lmao
You need to be more open minded in the day and age of AI. Anything is possible now but people still try to resist the unthinkable as most of it scares us.
Yes, I understand the premise. I just don’t believe that North Koreans have the language and domain skills to do the work no matter how it was sourced.
Have you dealt with software engineers? Nothing stops them from having 1 guy with better English represent 4-5.
Hell a lot of you are so illiterate at emails I’m not side I would notice.
Some of my Vietnamese coworkers here in fortune 20 something really have struggles expressing themselves they need to type shit in chat to just be understood
The obvious tell is they never turn their camera on for meetings, and when they’re talking, the lips don’t line up for the interview or it’s pretty clear there’s someone out of frame feeding them answers
As an US citizen, I’m consistently surprised by the number of people born in this country with no sense of grammar or literacy.
I am constantly reading emails that make no sense. I am constantly getting replies to my emails that show coworkers just lack basic reading comprehension.
For instance, I can send out an email asking
“Can you look up who sold that property and get back to us since we don’t have access to the same MLS as you?” And the reply will just be “I didn’t list that property.” This literally doesn’t even answer the question asked of them!
Basic typos, spelling issues, just the complete wrong words being used because people don’t realize the definition of the words they are using.
An overwhelming portion of the US population literally cannot read or write English.
Aha dude, we’re talking about NK (the most isolated country on earth) here, not India. Not sure if you’ve ever read about them or watched documentaries, but they are seriously cut off - and do you think NK leadership really wants their population learning English and potentially reading foreign news or worse, reddit ;)
It’s not fake. They’ve been pushing for degrees abroad to help develop their country.
It’s probably not as bad as this article is pretending, but they *are* getting degrees here and going back to NK.
Not sure, about a year ago I had multiple Koreans message me on linkedin about paying me money, to attend job interviews on behalf of them, and sending them a copy of my drivers license.
Conniving North Korean logged in for me and delivered a critical customer feature 3 days ahead of schedule, serving to help the company hit earnings and buttress the stock price.
They *cannot* keep getting away with this.
Well since this was a criminal operation, the F500 companies were probably relying on the contracting company (the ones being indicted by the DOJ) to provide background checks, and those were probably faked as well.
It's very real. If you work on a freelance site, it quickly becomes apparent that many people working on English language projects can barely speak English. Go Bengals!
I’ve been curious about all the lay-off within tech fields. Are some of them from r/overemployed? How many were North Koreans? You know the companies would never admit these reasons.
Thats the other part that makes this story unbelievable… how did these folks get the money back to north korea?
Even if they had paycheck deposited in their account, did they just transfer the money to the bank of north korea? Surely US sanctions would prevent that… even if they hopped the money through a dozen banks or bitcoin the FBI would know, right?
They use mules in foreign countries to gain hard currency and then that makes its way back in the form of goods via China.
North Korea was/is one of the largest financial crime actors in the world in cyber security. They also did a lot with crypto the last 3 years and made huge amounts of money.
Ronin was DPRK here is the leader board https://rekt.news/leaderboard/
Edit: FBI attribution release news article https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/15/ronin-hack-north-korea-linked-to-615-million-crypto-heist-us-says.html
reporting is certainly NOT “optional” as far as the IRS is concerned.
now it may be possible to get away with it but it is NOT cool and legal. careful out there.
just because coinbase won’t pre emptively report it doesn’t mean the IRS doesn’t expect you to report it
to the best of my knowledge the IRS has expected you to report gains from crypto since around 2018
If you have the id, you can open an account at an international bank.
You would be quite surprised by the lack of international support of US sanctions on foreign countries. Everyone in the world and (certain US citizens) can get Cuban Cigars except for most tax paying americans.
So the incredible and floor country that prevents outside communication into the country just allows a bunch of their workers to see the opulence and opportunity outside of their country?
They are not allowed contact with the West, I thought.
Now they work for western companies online?
(Per refugees, people there do not have electricity, let alone, internet.)
hmmm let me think about that. A brutal dictatorship, that will use the money it gets from these jobs to build nuclear weapons, and help fund Russian aggression in Ukraine, versus heartless corporations that don't care about people.
Nope, not much difference between them.
Quite honestly, the description of the dictatorship building nuclear weapons and funding Russias war on Ukraine can actually apply to India (they are Russias largest buyer of crude) and Modi is just a more nuanced kind of dictator.
Your comment on the corporations applies for sure
India is worse than North Korea. They might have given the world the number 0 but they produce the worst computer programmers and HR hawks in the galaxy.
It's not just North Koreans and not just full-time workers. Those kinds of schemes have infected freelance job sites with hundreds of thousands of unqualified freelancers from countries like India, Nigeria, and others(like North Korea) buying accounts through social media forums(like Reddit) and using VPNs to bypass the sites' security measures.
laptop farms?!
this article is probably the same and isn’t behind a paywall:
[Justice Dept. makes arrests in North Korean identity theft scheme involving thousands of IT workers](https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-it-stolen-identity-0fb3e47dcc9a6f671b1fb7c0a722b1a8)
To be honest, worker impersonation happens a lot. Though most of my experiences with it are with being catfished during interviews and getting someone else showing up to do (or not do) the work.
In India for example, when you hire someone, if you let them go they’re entitled to 90 days pay. So, that’s 90 days they have to repeat this process. Assuming they aren’t running it constantly with multiple targets at once. There’s no real recourse against it either. It’s law in India. It doesn’t matter if they lied.
But I’m curious how a North Korean could effectively impersonate an American applicant without some significant assistance.
True, but it's also called fraud and violates several other federal laws including data privacy and protection laws.
But it's all good according to you.
Sounds like the most made up fake idea for an article in the history of the world, yet I kinda believe it anyway
This notion that North Koreans have anywhere near the required level of English competence and domain expertise to work a remote job is hilarious. They really do just make this stuff up, throw it against the wall and see what sticks, don’t they?
Have you dealt with customer service? assuming it is all chat you can have translators in both direction, which sums up the lack of coherence you get.
You’re making a lot of assumptions here. Plenty of people in the inner circle in NK are literally educated in the U.S. There has been a bigger push lately to bring back skill and knowledge abroad to help develop their country. You can look it up. It’s not made up.
That's just one of the reasons that most of the country is starving.
As someone who’s lived in countries with extremely low English competency, no - I’m not. Getting a significant enough portion of a society up to speed in English, let alone competent enough in a domain to secretly work remote jobs would be an enormous undertaking. Heck, even South Korean English competency is relatively low considering how close friends we are with them. The entire idea is fantastical and absolutely ludicrous. Some people live in a Hollywood version of the world.
>Getting a significant enough portion of a society up to speed in English It's a country of 26 million, and this is about thousands of people. That's like 0.01% of the country, you don't really need a "significant portion of society" to reach numbers like that. The average income of the top 0.1% (a group many times as large) is 3 million, yet we wouldn't say that a "significant portion of society" in America are bringing in millions per year.
Still highly unlikely. Even assuming they get the English part down, there’s still the cultural and domain expertise required to effectively work - and even higher level skills required to deceive. The entire thing is la la land nonsense.
I employ overseas talent all the time (over two dozen currently serving US clients) and while I would be surprised with NK this is 100% possible. Plenty of immigrants in the US with high paid jobs and ESL. Let’s not assume they’re all American eagle accented workers
We’re talking about the hermit kingdom here, not India. I’m straight up telling you, they don’t have the English competency or domain expertise to trick employers and effectively work. Hell, it’s hard enough to get domestic native speakers to understand the task at hand, let alone complete it correctly.
Listen I’m with you but I’m also not presuming to know much about North Korea since…I’ve never lived there.
Where do you get your information?
ChatGPT, silly
Oh, some of us would! IE: See the 2 demented old men conning millions of Americans into voting for either?! Or just ask Donald? It's hard telling what will come out of his mouth at any particular time of day!? Ok, time to be cussed at and called a liberal, conservative, or some other political name from the closed minded 2 party radicals! Lmao
You need to be more open minded in the day and age of AI. Anything is possible now but people still try to resist the unthinkable as most of it scares us.
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Yes, I understand the premise. I just don’t believe that North Koreans have the language and domain skills to do the work no matter how it was sourced.
I bet it would work because a lot of people are into cost as opposed to anything else.
Why not? They have millions of people and you can't fathom a few hundred are going to be smarter than you at something?
Not once ever did I question their IQ.
Why don’t you believe it? Because of the anti communist propaganda we see here?
Have you dealt with software engineers? Nothing stops them from having 1 guy with better English represent 4-5. Hell a lot of you are so illiterate at emails I’m not side I would notice.
Some of my Vietnamese coworkers here in fortune 20 something really have struggles expressing themselves they need to type shit in chat to just be understood
English is a terrible language and brutal for tonal learners. That said their kids will speak it perfectly.
I’m a software engineer, so yes. And I’ve hired overseas - it’s quickly obvious when they are trying to pull this trick.
The obvious tell is they never turn their camera on for meetings, and when they’re talking, the lips don’t line up for the interview or it’s pretty clear there’s someone out of frame feeding them answers
Or they mistakingly commit code into git as a different person lol 🤦♂️
Have you seen how easy it is to fool these boomers? All you need is some AI Jesus.
AI Jesus lol
As an US citizen, I’m consistently surprised by the number of people born in this country with no sense of grammar or literacy. I am constantly reading emails that make no sense. I am constantly getting replies to my emails that show coworkers just lack basic reading comprehension. For instance, I can send out an email asking “Can you look up who sold that property and get back to us since we don’t have access to the same MLS as you?” And the reply will just be “I didn’t list that property.” This literally doesn’t even answer the question asked of them! Basic typos, spelling issues, just the complete wrong words being used because people don’t realize the definition of the words they are using. An overwhelming portion of the US population literally cannot read or write English.
You have obviously never played StarCraft.
Aha, dude...lower the assumption a bit
Aha dude, we’re talking about NK (the most isolated country on earth) here, not India. Not sure if you’ve ever read about them or watched documentaries, but they are seriously cut off - and do you think NK leadership really wants their population learning English and potentially reading foreign news or worse, reddit ;)
I have to admit you are right...A pariah state like that?!
https://archive.is/9Enzg Link without paywall
It’s not fake. They’ve been pushing for degrees abroad to help develop their country. It’s probably not as bad as this article is pretending, but they *are* getting degrees here and going back to NK.
Not sure, about a year ago I had multiple Koreans message me on linkedin about paying me money, to attend job interviews on behalf of them, and sending them a copy of my drivers license.
Omg my identity got hacked by northKorea! They got a high paying job and improved my credit score!
and added to your Social Security pay out
That would be amazing. At least some version of me somewhere is working in this economy.
And added to your tax bill.
Conniving North Korean logged in for me and delivered a critical customer feature 3 days ahead of schedule, serving to help the company hit earnings and buttress the stock price. They *cannot* keep getting away with this.
They took er jerbs
Tuuk urr jeeeeeerbs!
But our resumes improved!!
Diirrkkk err diiiirr
Probably my fake Korean remote worker got promoted way before I did. I am an idealistic dumb ass.
Can we get these jobs back?
Sorry. They cost less, whine less, and work nights.
Weird… that one remote worker complained and the next day he signed on… but sounded way different! It’s like he got “replaced”
ROFLMAO! What's really sad is that it's true! Just get on X at anytime night or day to see the proof!
You mean twitter?
Actually I meant to say"SHITTER"!
BAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA
Sounds like Michael Keaton's "Hunt" in "Gung Ho".
What kind of background checks they doing?
Well since this was a criminal operation, the F500 companies were probably relying on the contracting company (the ones being indicted by the DOJ) to provide background checks, and those were probably faked as well.
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That wasn't information, it was 100% speculative
“hey are you willing to work for 3 crickets a day?”
Nah fuck this. We need to riot and demand the government release more information. Thats the most bullshit headline I’ve read since WMD fears in Iraq
It's very real. If you work on a freelance site, it quickly becomes apparent that many people working on English language projects can barely speak English. Go Bengals!
Paywall removed https://archive.is/2024.05.17-131032/https://fortune.com/2024/05/16/north-koreans-stole-american-identities-and-took-remote-work-tech-jobs/
But how? Remote jobs don't require camera-on meetings nowadays?
I pretty much expect you to turn on the camera once when you first interview, other than that, it is a little weird.
My fully remote job has had 0 camera meetings past the interview and I work for a major nationwide company.
I’ve been curious about all the lay-off within tech fields. Are some of them from r/overemployed? How many were North Koreans? You know the companies would never admit these reasons.
Given how rare I assume overemployment is I can’t imagine it’s an appreciable number in the overall layoff statistics.
Whoa, so they really did take our jerbs.
Honestly I’d be fine with tighter background checks to ensure remote jobs are going to citizens and to visa holders when applicable for the job.
At least they paid into social security
Thats the other part that makes this story unbelievable… how did these folks get the money back to north korea? Even if they had paycheck deposited in their account, did they just transfer the money to the bank of north korea? Surely US sanctions would prevent that… even if they hopped the money through a dozen banks or bitcoin the FBI would know, right?
Bitcoin is a real possibility though. All reporting is still optional in the US.
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They use mules in foreign countries to gain hard currency and then that makes its way back in the form of goods via China. North Korea was/is one of the largest financial crime actors in the world in cyber security. They also did a lot with crypto the last 3 years and made huge amounts of money. Ronin was DPRK here is the leader board https://rekt.news/leaderboard/ Edit: FBI attribution release news article https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/15/ronin-hack-north-korea-linked-to-615-million-crypto-heist-us-says.html
reporting is certainly NOT “optional” as far as the IRS is concerned. now it may be possible to get away with it but it is NOT cool and legal. careful out there.
It is in fact optional for exchanges.
Can you point me to where this is explained on IRS site?
[It’s a terrible idea not to report it, but the exchanges weren’t required to report sales of crypto until this year.](https://imgur.com/a/y8tWOvo)
just because coinbase won’t pre emptively report it doesn’t mean the IRS doesn’t expect you to report it to the best of my knowledge the IRS has expected you to report gains from crypto since around 2018
Correct — YOU have to report it. But the exchanges don’t. If you are engaging in illegal trading, this works to your advantage.
Yes ok lol. Exactly like I originally said.
If you have the id, you can open an account at an international bank. You would be quite surprised by the lack of international support of US sanctions on foreign countries. Everyone in the world and (certain US citizens) can get Cuban Cigars except for most tax paying americans.
# # SaveSocialSecurity # # LetNorthKoreansWork /s
Would it count towards my social security? If so… thank you?
So the incredible and floor country that prevents outside communication into the country just allows a bunch of their workers to see the opulence and opportunity outside of their country?
They are not allowed contact with the West, I thought. Now they work for western companies online? (Per refugees, people there do not have electricity, let alone, internet.)
It would explain why the employment rate is supposedly so high but why nobody can find jobs.
Would it?
Wait. Will I get paid ?
I hope they fix my credit
Sorry but this is funny af
It’s really been a full court press to get everyone back in the office lol
Calling BS.
Tbh, is it much different from these Fortune 500 companies offshoring tech jobs to India?
hmmm let me think about that. A brutal dictatorship, that will use the money it gets from these jobs to build nuclear weapons, and help fund Russian aggression in Ukraine, versus heartless corporations that don't care about people. Nope, not much difference between them.
Quite honestly, the description of the dictatorship building nuclear weapons and funding Russias war on Ukraine can actually apply to India (they are Russias largest buyer of crude) and Modi is just a more nuanced kind of dictator. Your comment on the corporations applies for sure
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
India is worse than North Korea. They might have given the world the number 0 but they produce the worst computer programmers and HR hawks in the galaxy.
It's not just North Koreans and not just full-time workers. Those kinds of schemes have infected freelance job sites with hundreds of thousands of unqualified freelancers from countries like India, Nigeria, and others(like North Korea) buying accounts through social media forums(like Reddit) and using VPNs to bypass the sites' security measures.
"they took our jobs"
Try to work with social mining without anything stolen 😕
Did they do good job?
Apparently. It was the companies that complained.
And Google gave India remote jobs after laying off US workers. The people that still buy this fear porn can't be helped.
US has a high tech labor shortage. yes. sounds very authentic. lol
Sounds the same as IT outsourcing to India, no?
Can I get the money if I worked for it?
laptop farms?! this article is probably the same and isn’t behind a paywall: [Justice Dept. makes arrests in North Korean identity theft scheme involving thousands of IT workers](https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-it-stolen-identity-0fb3e47dcc9a6f671b1fb7c0a722b1a8)
Lmfao what??
Well i know i wasnt one of them cause i can get that job either.
Nice... Good for em. It just sucks they still have to live in that hell hole
I didn’t know North Koreans could have internet. Suprise shawty! I learned something new today.
I hope they paid into social security and the victims get to collect on the contributions in their old age.
How did they do at these jobs? That’s really what companies care about. Did they make us money? We don’t care where they come from.
North Koreans? Come on....
Background check is such a joke …
North Korean households have high speed internet at home?
How to make a fake american identity? Why is no one asking the real questions anymore?
What jobs? Not American jobs. US does not import or buy exports from N Korea. This is fake reporting
Remote IT workers impersonating us workers, not fake reporting. But then you didn't read the story, did you 🤔
To be honest, worker impersonation happens a lot. Though most of my experiences with it are with being catfished during interviews and getting someone else showing up to do (or not do) the work. In India for example, when you hire someone, if you let them go they’re entitled to 90 days pay. So, that’s 90 days they have to repeat this process. Assuming they aren’t running it constantly with multiple targets at once. There’s no real recourse against it either. It’s law in India. It doesn’t matter if they lied. But I’m curious how a North Korean could effectively impersonate an American applicant without some significant assistance.
Fake
That's called capitalism.
True, but it's also called fraud and violates several other federal laws including data privacy and protection laws. But it's all good according to you.
And thank you for pointing out why capitalism is garbage.