The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Journal – "The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea"

Release Date: June 3, 2025
Host: Annie Minoff & Bob McMillan
Co-produced by Spotify and The Wall Street Journal

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Introduction

In the gripping episode titled "The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea," The Journal delves into the intriguing and alarming story of Christina Chapman, an ordinary American who became entangled in a sophisticated scam orchestrated by North Korean operatives. Hosted by Annie Minoff and Bob McMillan, the episode unpacks how Chapman transitioned from struggling gig worker to a pivotal figure in facilitating multimillion-dollar fraud aimed at propping up the sanctioned North Korean regime.

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Background: Christina Chapman's Struggles

The episode opens by painting a vivid picture of Christina Chapman’s precarious financial situation. In January 2021, Chapman reached out to her TikTok followers, seeking help as she navigated homelessness.

Christina Chapman [04:56]: "I'm classified as homeless in Minnesota. I live in a travel trailer. I don't have running water, I don't have a working bathroom, and now I don't have heat."

Prior to her descent into fraudulent activities, Chapman had attempted to reinvent herself amidst the gig economy. She worked various jobs, including as a waitress and massage therapist, and even attended a tech boot camp to acquire web development skills. Despite these efforts, her financial woes persisted, leaving her vulnerable to the scam that would soon change her life.

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The Spark: A LinkedIn Message and the Laptop Farming Scam

Just months before her public plea for help on TikTok, Chapman received a seemingly promising job offer via LinkedIn from a foreign company seeking a U.S. representative.

Bob McMillan [05:48]: "The message comes via LinkedIn and it says, we're a foreign company looking for a U.S. representative. That's really all we know about the message."

Unbeknownst to Chapman, this was the entry point to a vast North Korean scam known as laptop farming. This operation involved North Korean workers being hired under false identities to perform remote tech jobs, with their earnings funneled back into North Korea to support the regime's sanctioned activities, including nuclear weapons development.

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Mechanics of the Scam: How Laptop Farming Works

Laptop farming serves as the backbone of the scam, enabling North Korean operatives to disguise their activities and integrate seamlessly into legitimate U.S. corporate environments. The process involves several key steps:

1. Hiring Remote Workers: North Koreans apply for and secure remote tech positions, often in coding or cybersecurity, under fabricated identities.

2. Operational Setup: The earnings from these positions are redirected to North Korea, generating millions in revenue for the regime.

3. Data Theft and Extortion: Beyond financial gains, these scammers also steal sensitive data and extort employers, exacerbating the threat to U.S. businesses.

Bob McMillan [06:56]: "They steal data and they extort their employers."

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Christina Chapman's Role: From Livelihood to Criminal Enterprise

Christina Chapman became a central figure in this scam by managing the backend operations—essentially acting as an HR representative, administrative assistant, and tech support for these illicit activities.

Bob McMillan [11:25]: "She's responding to all the requests that are coming into all these North Korean workers to just making sure they get through the HR onboarding."

Chapman's responsibilities included handling extensive paperwork, setting up remote access tools on laptops, and ensuring the North Korean workers could seamlessly integrate into their roles without raising suspicion. Her efforts were instrumental in facilitating a system that, according to federal indictments, funneled over $17 million through her operations.

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Financial Gains and Lavish Lifestyle

Despite her grim beginnings, Chapman's involvement in laptop farming allowed her to significantly improve her standard of living. Over two years, she earned just under $177,000 in fees from a scam that generated more than $17 million.

Bob McMillan [12:08]: "She made a percent of that in fees."

With her illicit earnings, Chapman moved into a four-bedroom house in Phoenix, enjoyed the company of her three Chihuahuas, and indulged in personal luxuries, all while maintaining a facade of normalcy on social media.

Christina Chapman [12:59]: "Look at how beautiful that is. It is such an elegant statement piece."

This stark transformation was highlighted by contrasting TikTok posts—one where Chapman pleaded for help, and another showcasing her newfound affluence, such as acquiring a $72 green ring and enjoying VIP experiences at local events.

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The Downfall: FBI Intervention and Legal Consequences

Chapman's seemingly stable life unraveled in October 2023 when the FBI executed a raid on her residence, seizing approximately 90 devices central to the laptop farming operation.

Bob McMillan [14:08]: "The FBI knocks on her door and they seize all these laptops."

In early 2024, Chapman was arrested and charged with fraud, identity theft, and money laundering. She ultimately pled guilty and faces a sentencing date that could result in over nine years of imprisonment. While there's no concrete evidence proving she knowingly collaborated with North Korean authorities, incriminating chat excerpts suggest her awareness of the illegality of her actions.

Bob McMillan [14:38]: "There's no evidence to show that she knew she was working with the North Koreans, but there's excerpts of her chats that are included in charging documents. It's pretty clear she knew she was doing something illegal."

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Aftermath: Returning to Hardship

Post-arrest, Chapman’s life spiraled back into instability. Stripped of her laptop farming income, she struggled to secure gig work sufficient to sustain herself, resorting to low-paying jobs such as DoorDash deliveries and attempting various fundraising avenues.

Bob McMillan [15:07]: "She tries GoFundMes. She just tries anything she can to kind of keep herself housed."

Currently, according to her attorney, Chapman is residing in a homeless shelter, echoing the hardships she faced before falling into the scam.

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Industry and Government Response: Combating the Laptop Farming Phenomenon

The proliferation of laptop farming has prompted significant concern among both government agencies and private corporations. Strategies to counteract this scam include:

• Enhanced Verification Processes: Companies are encouraged to implement stricter in-person verification measures to ensure the legitimacy of remote employees.

Bob McMillan [16:04]: "You gotta meet them face to face. Like, you gotta bring them in."

• Technology and Security Enhancements: Financial institutions and high-security sectors are bolstering their security protocols to detect and prevent unauthorized access and identity theft.

Despite these efforts, challenges persist. The anonymity of the internet and the inventive tactics of scammers make it difficult to completely eradicate such fraudulent operations.

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Conclusion

"The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea" serves as a compelling exploration of how economic desperation can lead individuals down paths of illicit activity. Christina Chapman's story exemplifies the intricate web of cyber fraud orchestrated by state actors like North Korea, highlighting the vulnerabilities within the gig economy and remote work infrastructures. The episode underscores the urgent need for robust cybersecurity measures and vigilant human resource practices to safeguard against such pervasive scams.

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For more insightful stories about money, business, and power, follow The Journal on Spotify or your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

[Annie Minoff]

Bob, can you tell me about this influencer you've been watching on TikTok?

[Bob McMillan]

Yeah. Her name is Christina Chapman.

[Christina Chapman]

Hi, lovelies. I just wanted to pop on for a second. I got a package.

[Bob McMillan]

And she talks about food accountability.

[Christina Chapman]

I guess it's day three of day three, day two of accountable, accountable eating.

[Bob McMillan]

She talks about political causes that I.

[Christina Chapman]

Will support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

[Bob McMillan]

She talks about Japanese boy bands.

[Christina Chapman]

And I'm wearing my shirt Epidemia. This is not official march list. These are shirts that I made myself.

[Bob McMillan]

And every now and then there's. She'll slip in something about maybe a Renaissance fair, you know, just the kind of things that people Want to watch TikTok videos about.

[Annie Minoff]

Our colleague Bob McMillan covers cybersecurity. And there's one video of Chapman's in particular that he says is a bit unusual. On its face, it's pretty innocuous. Chapman's showing her followers some breakfast that she picked up.

[Christina Chapman]

I just got a smoothie bowl. It's an acai smoothie bowl, and it has bananas, strawberries, mangoes.

[Bob McMillan]

What's really interesting to me is that it's not shot in her kitchen. It's shot in her spare room. But there are racks on the wall of the room. No pictures or anything, just these racks. And on the racks are laptop computers. I counted at least 10 laptop computers with different colored sticky notes on them. And the computers are whirring away in the background there as she talks about the smoothies she's eating.

[Christina Chapman]

So it doesn't really taste finnicoada anymore, but it's good.

[Annie Minoff]

What was Christina chapman doing with 10 laptops in her spare room? Well, according to a federal indictment, what.

[Bob McMillan]

She'S doing is a scam. And what the scam is called is laptop farming.

[Annie Minoff]

The US Government says that Christina Chapman was a laptop farmer and her employer was North Korea.

[Bob McMillan]

She's facilitating a multimillion dollar fraud that's designed to bring money into the heavily sanctioned North Korean regime.

[Annie Minoff]

Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Annie Minoff. It's Tuesday, June 3rd. Coming up on the show, how an everyday American helped North Korea scam Corporate Americ.

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[Christina Chapman]

Hi everybody. TikTok fam. I need some help and I don't know really how to do this.

[Annie Minoff]

In January 2021, Christina Chapman took to TikTok to check in with her followers. Her financial situation was precarious.

[Bob McMillan]

I mean, she had worked as a waitress, as a massage therapist, and right around 2019, she decided to sort of reinvent herself in the era of the gig economy. She went to a tech boot camp and got some web development skills, but it wasn't paying out right. Like she was living in a small town north of Minneapolis, basically in a trailer.

[Christina Chapman]

I'm classified as homeless in Minnesota. I live in a travel trailer. I don't have running water, I don't have a working bathroom, and now I don't have heat.

[Annie Minoff]

But Chapman's situation was about to turn around. In fact, the answer to her financial troubles had arrived just a few months before she posted that video in the form of a social media message.

[Bob McMillan]

The message comes via LinkedIn and it says, we're a foreign company looking for a U.S. representative. That's really all we know about the message.

[Annie Minoff]

We do know that Chapman agreed to help out, and according to court documents, we know who that message came from. North Korean scammers. Chapman had stumbled into what's become a vast scam designed to bring hundreds of millions of dollars into North Korea. It took off during the pandemic when many US Tech jobs moved online. And it works like North Koreans trained in it. Apply for remote jobs in the U.S. those workers get hired, start work, and get paid, all under false identities.

[Bob McMillan]

There's almost always a tech job, right? So it's quite often coding.

[Annie Minoff]

And do they do the job?

[Bob McMillan]

Yeah, they do. You know, like, I've heard stories of these, some North Koreans, they just kind of. They get hired, they log into a couple meetings, they never say anything, and then they're quickly fired. Right? And then some apparently last for years.

[Annie Minoff]

According to the FBI, their paychecks likely get funneled to the North Korean regiment, where the money may help fund things like the country's nuclear weapons program.

[Bob McMillan]

This is sort of their latest hustle, and it's a pretty lucrative one. The FBI estimates they make hundreds of millions of dollars a year from this. But the other problem is that they also steal data and they extort their employers.

[Annie Minoff]

What kind of stuff?

[Bob McMillan]

Well, I mean, whatever they can get their hands on.

[Annie Minoff]

These North Korean scammers have been able to infiltrate a wide range of industries, from retail to the auto industry, even to cybersecurity.

[Bob McMillan]

There's one cybersecurity company, I don't know who it is, but they apparently hired nine workers that turned out to be North Koreans.

[Annie Minoff]

That is wild to me. Imagine being a North Korean hacker and applying for a job at a cybersecurity company.

[Bob McMillan]

Yeah, imagine getting it. Richard, what are you looking for in terms of challenges with this job? I'm looking for any challenges and opportunities for my professional growth.

[Annie Minoff]

The US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike shared a video with the Journal. It shows just how adept North Korean scammers have become at acing job interviews.

[Bob McMillan]

So maybe in the next five years later, I can see myself on a leader position. But right now, I'm looking for an individual contributor role.

[Annie Minoff]

Scammers have no problem doing interviews, showing up for zoom meetings, and coding remotely. But there are some tasks that they can't do, tasks that require them to be physically present in the U.S. but the scammers have found a way around this too.

[Bob McMillan]

They'll just hire some random person to show up at the company, pretend to be the worker whose identity they've stolen, and collect their laptop or collect a badge. Like, they will hire people to receive packages, to reship things if they need somebody to be in a certain state or something like that. The companies have these controls, you know, to make sure that the people that they're hiring are legitimate. And the North Koreans are just, like, remarkably creative in just hiring somebody to solve any kind of control you have.

[Annie Minoff]

One key hire is the laptop farmer. How important is the laptop farmer in all of this?

[Bob McMillan]

Yeah, it's like the heart and soul of it. All right. Because corporations don't react well to employees logging in from North Korea. You need to look like you're connecting to the corporate Internet from America.

[Annie Minoff]

Laptop farmers help make that happen. They receive North Koreans work laptops and help set them up so that the scammers can operate them remotely. They also help with logging on in the morning and logging off at night. And that's what Christina Chapman did after she got that LinkedIn message. Chapman became one of what researchers estimate could be dozens of laptop farmers who've cropped up all across the U.S. christina.

[Bob McMillan]

Receives the laptops that these remote workers get issued as part of their jobs, and she sets them all up and makes them all run from her room.

[Annie Minoff]

But according to the indictment, that was just the beginning.

[Bob McMillan]

Christina Chapman did a lot of things for her clients that were crucial to the whole fraud, and she kind of operated like a staffing agency for illegal workers.

[Annie Minoff]

How laptop farming transformed Chapman's life. That's after the break.

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[Annie Minoff]

By January 2023. Christina Chapman was much more than a veteran laptop farmer. She was like an HR representative, administrative assistant, and tech support all rolled into one person.

[Bob McMillan]

She's basically responding to all the requests that are coming into all these North Korean workers to just making sure they get through the HR onboarding. When you get hired, you got to fill out, you know, W2s so much paperwork. You got to provide proof that you can work in the United States. You have to install some sort of remote access tool on the laptop so that the North Koreans can connect to it and pretend to be working from that laptop. And, you know, sometimes she. She. She seemed a bit worn out from all the. She talks about the demands of her clients and how demanding they were.

[Christina Chapman]

And I did not make my own breakfast this morning. My clients are going crazy. So I just.

[Annie Minoff]

How much money was she making in this job?

[Bob McMillan]

Well, she made okay money, you know, not like crazy amounts of money. I mean, according to the Fed, she brought in the paychecks that were paid to the fake workers that worked through her laptop farm amounted to more than $17 million.

[Annie Minoff]

Wow.

[Bob McMillan]

And she made a percent of that in fees.

[Annie Minoff]

Chapman's total earnings amounted to just under $177,000 over two years. With that money, she was able to move into a four bedroom house in Phoenix with a roommate. It even had a yard for her three Chihuahuas, Henry, Serenity, and Barito. And she could afford to treat herself once in a while.

[Bob McMillan]

This one video really stood out to me. She's in her backyard. She's unboxing this Carla Rockmore jewelry.

[Annie Minoff]

Chapman opens the packaging to reveal a $72 green ring.

[Christina Chapman]

Look at how beautiful that is. It is such an elegant statement piece.

[Bob McMillan]

So beautiful, you know, and she's so excited. And she, at one point she says, I've never purchased jewelry with care instructions before.

[Christina Chapman]

This is my first jewelry I've ever purchased with care instructions.

[Annie Minoff]

That same day, Chapman posted about going to a comedy show where drunken actors perform Shakespeare.

[Bob McMillan]

And she talks about how she wants to bid for the queen seat there. And that's the cushioned seat. And then she gets it.

[Christina Chapman]

Today I got to be queen, queen for the night. And I got to die. I got to act out my death. And it was amazing.

[Annie Minoff]

Such a contrast from the woman who was crying on the TikTok and now can afford to have the queen seat.

[Bob McMillan]

Yeah, I mean, she was showering in her gym, you know, a couple years earlier, and now she's got the queen seat at drunken Shakespeare.

[Annie Minoff]

But then In October of 2023, Chapman's life took yet another turn.

[Bob McMillan]

The FBI knocks on her door and they, they seize all these laptops. They seize 90 devices from her house, and, you know, that's the end of it.

[Annie Minoff]

In early 2024, Chapman was arrested and charged with fraud, identity theft, and money laundering. She pleaded guilty. She's due to be sentenced next month and could face just over nine years in prison. Did she know she was doing the bidding of the North Koreans?

[Bob McMillan]

Well, there's no evidence to show that she knew she was working with the North Koreans, but there's excerpts of her chats that are included in charging documents. It's pretty clear she knew she was doing something illegal. She talks about the illegality of, you know, signing federal forms and forging signatures and things like that.

[Annie Minoff]

Without her laptop farming job, Chapman found herself back in a familiar situation, trying to string together enough gig work to make ends meet.

[Bob McMillan]

At one point, she goes out, does doordash in Phoenix and makes like $7.25 for the night. She Tries to sell coloring books. She tries GoFundMes. She just tries anything she can to kind of keep herself housed.

[Annie Minoff]

According to her attorney, Chapman is currently living at a homeless shelter. She's right back where she started.

[Bob McMillan]

Even worse. Yeah.

[Annie Minoff]

Now that this has become such a pervasive problem, how are government agencies and companies fighting back against this North Korean remote worker scam?

[Bob McMillan]

You know, it's funny. I interviewed the CSO of Amazon a couple of weeks ago, and he was aware of this problem. And I said, what do you do about it? And he said, bring your employees in five days a week.

[Annie Minoff]

For any boss who's been looking for an excuse to bring people back to the office, this is it.

[Bob McMillan]

I mean, you gotta meet them face to face. Like, you gotta bring them in. This is a huge problem. Like, there's no driver's license for the Internet, right? And it is basically impossible to really know that you are meeting somebody who is who they claim to be, right? Like, so if you deal with financial institutions or the government, they have all these systems to sort of establish security questions. Two factor security questions. All this stuff and what the North Koreans have shown with this laptop farming phenomenon is a big part of it can be circumvented by just hiring somebody through a gig economy website to cheat it. Criminals are just able to pretend to be anyone they want.

[Annie Minoff]

That's all for today. Tuesday, June 3rd. The Journal is a co production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. If you like the show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.