My colleague, the scammer

Summary

Today, Explained: Episode Summary – "My Colleague, the Scammer"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Today, Explained
• Hosts: Sean Rameswaram and Noel King
• Description: Vox's daily news explainer podcast guiding listeners through the most important stories of the day.
• Episode: My Colleague, the Scammer
• Release Date: May 19, 2025

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Introduction: The Invisible Threat of Remote Hiring

The episode "My Colleague, the Scammer" delves into the alarming rise of sophisticated scams infiltrating American companies through remote hires. Host Noel King introduces the topic by highlighting an FBI warning about companies inadvertently hiring North Korean operatives posing as legitimate software engineers.

Key Points:

• FBI Warning: Companies often lack comprehensive verification of remote workers, making them vulnerable to sophisticated scammers.
• High-Profile Victims: Major corporations like Google and SentinelOne have reportedly fallen victim to these deceptive hires.

Notable Quote:

"[...] many companies really don't know who they're hiring. Big American companies like Google and SentinelOne have been tricked by compelling resumes and LinkedIn profiles into hiring North Koreans."
— Noel King [00:01]

Unmasking the Scam: Insights from Investigative Reporter Bobby Johnson

Bobby Johnson, a freelance investigative reporter based in the Bay Area, shares his journey into uncovering this intricate scam. Initially intrigued by reports of AI-driven scams, Johnson encountered Simon Wickmans, who manages a web security company and provides firsthand insights into the deceptive hiring practices.

Key Points:

• Suspicious Patterns: An overwhelming number of applications with inconsistencies such as mismatched resumes, unusual accents, identical coding test performances, and repetitive interview behaviors raised red flags.
• AI Assistance: Scammers utilize AI tools to excel in technical assessments and generate scripted responses during interviews.
• Visual Deception: The use of standard video backgrounds and visible reflections of AI bots in glasses indicated real-time assistance during interviews.

Notable Quote:

"And the clincher really was that he saw one of the candidates was wearing glasses. And as the candidate was answering questions, Simon could see in the lenses of the glasses a reflection of an AI bot on the candidate's screen."
— Bobby Johnson [04:30]

The Mechanics of the Scam: How North Korean Operatives Infiltrate Companies

Johnson breaks down the operational structure of the scam, revealing a well-coordinated effort by North Korean teams to infiltrate foreign companies and siphon funds back to their regime.

Key Points:

• Recruitment and Deployment: North Korean agents are recruited post-college and sent to allied countries like China or Russia.
• Identity Theft: Operatives steal American identities to apply for jobs, using advanced AI tools to pass technical assessments and interviews.
• Task Sharing: Once employed, teams share tasks to maintain employment while minimal work is performed individually, ensuring they remain undetected.
• Financial Exploitation: Earnings from these roles are funneled back to North Korea, contributing significantly to its economy and military funding.
• Middlemen Role: Local accomplices in the U.S. manage logistical aspects, including receiving payments and maintaining laptop farms that enable operatives to work remotely.

Notable Quote:

"They share the tasks around the team, so they often seem to be doing their job pretty well. This is usually building websites or apps for a company, completing different tasks, you know, related stuff. And often they share those tasks around their team."
— Bobby Johnson [04:50]

Case Study: Christina Chapman and the Laptop Farms

The episode highlights the case of Christina Chapman, an Arizona woman who played a pivotal role as a middleman in this scam. Chapman managed a laptop farm, facilitating multiple operatives to work simultaneously for various companies.

Key Points:

• Operational Hub: Chapman operated out of her home, handling up to 60 laptops that connected North Korean operatives to their respective jobs.
• Financial Flow: She received payments, took a cut, and transferred the remaining funds to banks in China.
• Recruitment Tactics: Chapman was approached via LinkedIn with promises of easy income, targeting ordinary individuals who could operate discreetly without raising suspicions.
• Legal Consequences: Chapman pled guilty to several crimes related to identity theft and fraud, underscoring the organized nature of these scams.

Notable Quote:

"Christina Chapman was working out of her house in Litchfield Park. Someone approached her on LinkedIn, asking her to be the US face of their company."
— Noel King [05:26]

Understanding the North Korean Motivation: Insights into Kim Jong Un's Cyber Strategy

Johnson provides context on North Korea's strategic prioritization of cyber capabilities under Kim Jong Un's leadership, contrasting it with his father's anti-technology stance.

Key Points:

• Educational Shift: Kim Jong Un, educated in Switzerland, has promoted technology and cyber skills within North Korea, fostering a generation adept in hacking and cyber espionage.
• Economic Necessity: With limited legitimate economic avenues due to international sanctions, cybercrime has become a lucrative means to fund the regime.
• Operational Efficiency: North Korean hackers have achieved significant financial gains, including massive cryptocurrency heists, illustrating their proficiency and the regime's reliance on these activities.

Notable Quote:

"North Korea went from a country that basically had like one pipeline to connect to the Internet for years and years and years to a country that saw that maybe its only options or some of its options involved getting really good at technology."
— Bobby Johnson [17:22]

The Impact and Future Implications of the Scam

The discussion shifts to the broader implications of these scams on trust within corporate environments and the potential for future threats.

Key Points:

• Erosion of Trust: The prevalence of such scams undermines trust in remote work setups, making businesses wary of legitimate remote employees.
• Espionage Risks: Beyond financial theft, operatives could access sensitive data, intellectual property, and state secrets, posing significant national security threats.
• Technological Advancement of Scams: As scammers adopt more sophisticated technologies, combating these threats will become increasingly challenging.
• Legal and Enforcement Challenges: Extraditing offenders remains difficult, limiting prosecution to lower-level accomplices and victims rather than the primary North Korean operatives.

Notable Quote:

"There is this fundamental problem of eroding trust that you can't believe what your eyes are seeing. We see deep fakes happening all the time. We see misinformation."
— Bobby Johnson [24:52]

Conclusion: The Path Forward

The episode concludes by emphasizing the need for heightened awareness and preventive measures within companies to safeguard against such infiltrations. While legal and political solutions remain limited, fostering vigilance and implementing robust verification processes are critical steps in mitigating these sophisticated scams.

Key Points:

• Preventive Vigilance: Companies must train hiring personnel to recognize red flags and inconsistencies during remote hiring processes.
• Collaborative Efforts: Enhanced cooperation between cybersecurity experts, law enforcement, and corporations is essential to identify and dismantle these operations.
• Ongoing Threat: As North Korea continues to refine its cyber capabilities, the threat landscape will evolve, necessitating continuous adaptation and robust defense mechanisms.

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Final Thoughts

"My Colleague, the Scammer" sheds light on a covert operation that not only defrauds companies but also poses significant national security risks. Through in-depth reporting and expert insights, the episode underscores the complexities of modern cyber threats and the imperative for proactive measures to protect organizational integrity.

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Notable Contributors:

• Bobby Johnson: Investigative Reporter
• Noel King: Host
• Gabrielle Burbay: Producer
• Amina Elsadi: Editor
• Patrick Boyd: Engineer
• Laura Bullard: Fact-Checker

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This summary provides a comprehensive overview of the "My Colleague, the Scammer" episode from the "Today, Explained" podcast, capturing the essence of the discussions, key insights, and significant conclusions drawn by the hosts and guest contributors.

Transcript

[Noel King]

One of the big challenges of hiring remote workers is you don't really know who you're hiring. Recently, the FBI warned that many companies really don't know who they're hiring. Big American companies like Google and SentinelOne have been tricked by compelling resumes and LinkedIn profiles into hiring North Koreans. Now to the story of spies in the break room.

[Bobby Johnson]

The U.S. the U.K. and South Korea have jointly accused North Korea of using a cyber espionage group to steal sensitive and classified data to advance.

[Noel King]

Ahead on TODAY Explained. We talked to a reporter about what it's like to sit in on a job interview with a North Korean operative.

[Bobby Johnson]

We tried to keep it as sort of simple as possible. So I was just introduced as someone who was sitting on the call. We didn't want to alert them to obviously the, you know, the fact that I was a journalist because we didn't want to scare them away. We wanted to see what they had to say. With HubSpot's suite of AI powered tools.

[Noel King]

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[Bobby Johnson]

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[Claire White]

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[Noel King]

It'S today explained. I'm Noel King. The life of a freelance investigative reporter is not an easy one. A lot of time is spent figuring out what story is going to justify your time and talents. Such was the problem for reporter Bobby Johnson, who's based in the B Bay Area. Late last year Bobby had been hearing about people using AI to run scams and he decided to see if there was anything there.

[Bobby Johnson]

And so one evening I, I bumped into this young entrepreneur called Simon Wickmans at an event in San Francisco and I shared with him what I'd heard about and asked if he'd heard about anything. And he said, well, you'll never guess what happened to me recently. It turned out that Simon runs a web security company and he'd been interviewing people for a software engineering job, a remote software engineering job, so people not based near hq. And in interviewing he'd seen a Bunch of deeply suspicious activity. You know, he was worried that people were trying to fraudulently get jobs or something. And it turned out to be far more complicated and weirder than we expected. So what Simon spotted in the first place was that the job was bombarded with candidates, right? So the. There were hundreds of applications, way more than was typical. Then he started getting on video interviews with people, and strange things kept coming up. Lots of the applicants had resumes that didn't really match what he saw on screen. You know, maybe they had Anglo names, but were ethnically Asian. A lot of them said they were born and raised in America, in Tennessee or in Brooklyn, but they had really, really thick foreign accents. They all aced their coding test in almost exactly the same ways. But when he was talking with them, they often gave stilted answers and asked questions. Just about salary, but nothing else. And there were other things, too. So they all used similar default video background images. They had laggy Internet connections, and in the background, he could hear noise, so it sounded like they were in a busy room, not a call, like a call center, maybe, not what you would normally do a job interviewing. So these things, you know, individually, he didn't see any of these as a major red flag, because you can imagine why somebody's name doesn't fit their face in your conception, right? Or why they have an accent or why they use a default background on their video call. But as he spotted candidate after candidate following the same pattern, he started to get really suspicious of them. And. And then the clincher really was that he saw one of the candidates was wearing glasses. And as the candidate was answering questions, Simon could see in the lenses of the glasses a reflection of an AI bot on the candidate's screen. So what he could see was that this was pumping out a script of some kind for the applicant to read in order to answer Simon's questions. And he could see this happening in real time. So at this point, he figured, you know, his paranoia was well justified. What emerged as we got deeper and deeper in were not just that these were people who were, you know, trying to fraudulently get jobs, or people who were maybe running several different jobs at the same time, which we've seen a lot since the pandemic. But in fact, we were able to connect them back and see that they were actually operatives who are working for the North Korean regime to try and get jobs and send money back to North Korea, which is, it turns out, this kind of pretty widespread scam that's being perpetrated against American companies particularly. But all around the world.

[Noel King]

So by the time you met Simon at that event, he had clearly copped on that something was up here. Had Simon actually hired anyone in North Korea?

[Bobby Johnson]

No. So he'd. He'd realized that something strange was going on and hadn't hired anybody. But there are lots of companies around the country who have been hiring North Koreans unwittingly. And this is actually, it turns out there, it's a pretty widespread operation and well known in the cybersecurity industry and in parts of law enforcement. But it's really not something that's broken through into the public consciousness. Most people don't actually know about it. So when we started to put the pieces together and understand what was really going on, that's when the breadth and depth of this, of this thing became apparent.

[Noel King]

How does this work and to what degree is this going on, the scam?

[Bobby Johnson]

It's kind of basic in some ways, but wild in others. First of all, on the simplest level, you have teams of North Korean agents who are recruited out of college, and they get sent to work in other kind of friendly countries, typically China or Russia. They cross over the border and they go work in these teams. They steal people's identities, and they use those identities to apply for jobs. So they steal American identities and use them to apply for jobs in the US and they use all manner of AI enhancements to get the job. You know, like they. They use the AI coding tools to ace the test. They use the chatbots to script their answers so that they sound more competent. They use deepfake technologies to cheat ID verification, and some of the tests that you have to go through in order to get a job. So if they're lucky enough to get through the interviews, the surprising thing I think is they actually generally do the job that they've been employed to do. This is usually building websites or apps for a company, completing different tasks, you know, it related stuff. And often they share those tasks around their team. So there might be 10 or 15 people working in a team doing multiple jobs, and they basically are doing the minimum to stay employed. But because they share the tasks around the team, they're often very efficient and seem to be doing their job pretty well. So they stay under the radar. And all of this gives them time to earn cash that they then send back to North Korea. Now, software engineers, you know, can be pretty well compensated, so that's be a substantial amount of money, but they also use that access that they have as a developer to go and steal information, money, cryptocurrency, and even in some cases, plant malicious software on the victim's computer systems. In many cases, they don't get through to being hired. You know, they're just trying. They're testing the system. But when they do get through, sometimes they only last a few days until they do something that clear that they're. They're not who they say they are. But sometimes they stick around. I mean, I spoke to some victims who have unwittingly employed people, and for up to a year, you know, they've been working in a company and getting away with it. But the real trick, I think, and the key weakness in this scam, is that they need to use a middleman in the U.S. so, you know, the company will send forms to fill out. They'll send the computer for the developer to use. They'll. They need a place to send paychecks. You know, all of these require somebody on the ground. And if you're in a North Korean team in China or Russia, you don't have that person. So they work with an accomplice who manages the physical stuff. So they're based in the US and they will install software that lets the North Koreans dial into their computer from overseas and still look like they're in New Jersey or California or wherever they say they're based. So this means you have these middlemen who have houses full of laptops that all connect up to all the different jobs that they're working. And it's, you know, law enforcement calls that a laptop farm. And the accomplice gets up every morning, switches the computers on, make sure they're all running properly, lets the North Koreans dial in to those computers from overseas, and then carry on the job and carry on the subterfuge. And in some cases, the facilitators who have been caught have been found with, like, 50 or 60 laptops running simultaneously in their house. And that's the place where law enforcement is actually able to catch these gangs, understand what's going on, and try to stop it. So there's one case particularly that I dug into, which is of a middleman or middle woman in this case called Christina Chapman, who recently pled guilty to a range of different crimes related to this.

[Gabrielle Burbay]

Hey, lovelies, it's me. So today I am not being too experimental. I found something called avocado fries, which.

[Bobby Johnson]

She was based in Minnesota and Arizona, and over the space of a couple of years, she worked with a North Korean team and helped them target at least 300 different companies in the US including some pretty substantial ones.

[Gabrielle Burbay]

Howdy people. So today, I think, is day seven. And I did not make my own breakfast this morning. My clients are going crazy. So I just.

[Bobby Johnson]

Some of them were mom and pop shops, but some were big corporations, you know, And Chapman ran this scam. She would help the teams do their IT work. She would host a laptop farm with maybe 60 computers at the same time, and she would help them dial into meetings or keep up to date with stuff. She would receive money that she would then pass along to a bank in China and take a cut along the way.

[Noel King]

New at 10. An Arizona woman has been indicted in a series of complex identity theft cases that have been generating money for the North Korean government.

[Bobby Johnson]

Christina Chapman was working out of her house in Litchfield Park. Someone approached her on LinkedIn, asking her to be the US face of their company. What that meant was she got drawn into this, as far as we can tell, by the fact that there was a promise of some money and it was an easy way to earn some cash. And when I spoke to security experts about this, they said it's really typical for somebody to get drawn in, you know, and that's why they choose folks who are able to stay under the radar, right? People who have no significant profile. People who can just look ordinary and behave in pretty ordinary ways. The woman who lives around the corner from you or the. The guy who's, you know, lives in the apartment block or whatever. Just ordinary folks who can help perpetrate this scam without raising too many suspicions.

[Noel King]

Bobby Johnson. He's a freelance investigative reporter. He ended up writing this story for Wired. Coming up, Bobby goes to the flip side. Who are the North Koreans?

[Bobby Johnson]

Foreign.

[Noel King]

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[Claire White]

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[Noel King]

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[Gabrielle Burbay]

How much money does it actually cost to do a home renovation? This week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm joined by bachelorette Cont turned home renovation expert Tyler Cameron. From having just $200 in his bank account to getting a TV show on Amazon prime, this episode is packed with practical advice. Whether you're a homeowner or just hoping to be one someday.

[Bobby Johnson]

Two Two ways to take this first one is you're going to renovate your home. Why are you doing it? Are you doing it to make money? If so, then I'd focus on your kitchen. I'd focus on your bathrooms.

[Gabrielle Burbay]

Plus get the inside scoop on which projects are worth diying and which are better left to the pros. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com your rich BFF.

[Bobby Johnson]

This is today Explained.

[Noel King]

We're back with Bobby Johnson, who wrote about North Korean operatives getting hired by American companies for Wired. The companies don't like to talk about what is happening. Neither does North Korea. So Bobby relied on defectors who understand how the scam works from North Korea's end.

[Bobby Johnson]

So typically these guys, and they really are guys like you say young, you know, pretty much straight out of college. They are recruited to work in these teams of 10 or 15 people, and they basically operate like a criminal gang in a sort of digital sweatshop. So they are typically sent overseas. I don't think they get many choices. You know, they're sent overseas to live in a nondescript apartment, and it's pretty much a 24, 7 existence. They work there, they eat there, they sleep there. They are only allowed to leave in small, in groups to make sure that nobody runs away. And they get paid by the government and sometimes pretty well. But the regime also makes it clear that, you know, your family back in South Korea is under extra surveillance to try and dissuade people from trying to escape. But these, these teams are typically relatively low level. North Korea does also run sort of very high level hacking teams. And this kind of work is maybe a stepping stone towards that, but it's kind of where folks are paying their dues.

[Noel King]

Kim Jong Un is a very strange guy. He has interesting priorities, and this now, based on everything you've told us, really does appear to be one of them. How has he made this kind of cyber training a priority in North Korea? What could you find out about that?

[Bobby Johnson]

Yeah, so Kim Jong Un is a really interesting and strange leader. I mean, we all know kind of how he's behaved when he appears in public and the kind of things that North Korea has been doing with its weapons program and threats against other countries. North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, has ordered his country's military to be ready to use nuclear weapons at any time. North Korea threatening to test still more weapons of mass destruction after a beaming Kim Jong Un watch the latest missile launch. But unlike his father, who was very kind of anti technology and pretty old school, Kim Jong Un was actually educated in Switzerland under a pseudonym. He was kind of sent to school there, and he had access to Western culture and Western technology. And when he took over in the 2010s as supreme leader, he really switched things around. So North Korea went from a country that basically had like one pipeline to connect to the Internet for years and years and years to a country that saw that maybe its only options or some of its options involved getting really good at technology. And so he has encouraged and put more money and effort into funding computer science programs and technology literacy in North Korean schools. And that's bubbled up through various universities and colleges that sort of develop people's skills and teach them things, you know, they don't just teach them coding or how to use computers. They teach them how to hack and how to cover their tracks and all of this stuff. And so you get these young men, particularly coming out of college in North Korea, who have been trained for the last few years to really be operatives, you know, to be, make it possible for them to do this stuff. And it's paying dividends for North Korea. You know, for such a small country and one that doesn't have, like a big technology industry, they are, they punch way above their weight in terms of this stuff. And so there's a lot of cryptocurrency theft going on. Earlier this year, a couple of months ago, a crypto exchange in Dubai got hacked and $1.5 billion got stolen. And that was by North Korean hackers. So these, these guys have, have realized that this is a very lucrative way with very low cost to them. You know, really, it's just, you know, a computer and some training to get out there and cause havoc and fund the country that has no other way of making money.

[Noel King]

Do we know how much money this is making?

[Bobby Johnson]

You know, typically a team of pretenders might earn, you know, several million dollars a year through the different jobs that they're running. And I've seen lots of estimates wild all over the place, but the minimum is kind of around $3 million a year. Now, this is like, that's a lot of money, but it's not, you know, that's not a huge amount. But yeah, obviously the way North Korea operates, they're taking nearly all of that as profit. Right. And, and it's going straight back into military programs, it's going straight back into Kim Jong Un's slush fund. You know, that's going back into the country. And they're running. You know, there are many of these groups running different scams. And scale wise, you know, there's been a lot of activity in the U.S. but folks I spoke to are saying that they're seeing a real expansion of activity in Europe, in Japan and elsewhere. So this has now become a very lucrative scheme across the board for the North Koreans.

[Noel King]

I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of the American who ends up talking to one of these people in North Korea and figures it out is like, oh, this person is definitely not in Knoxville. And I wonder what you do about it. You can't call the police and say, somebody fraudulently applied for a job at my company. But also, this isn't right. It doesn't seem legal. What can law enforcement. And what does law enforcement actually do here?

[Bobby Johnson]

Yeah, this is really the. The tough thing in these cases because if you're. If you're smart enough to spot it before it happens to you, you know, kind of no crime has been really enacted upon you or something that's, you know, not gonna lead to a prosecution. But in any case, it's really hard to prosecute these cases because for the most part, the worst offenders are based in a country that the American courts can't extradite from. So, you know, we're not going to pull someone out of China or Russia. So that means the cases generally focus on the stolen identities and the accomplices. The real problem underneath all of this is that the political or economic solutions that you think would be possible just aren't really effective. Right. You can't enact sanctions against North Korea for this because the sanctions already enacted against North Korea are so punitive. Right. One of the reasons that these guys are doing this in the first place is because legal trade is basically zero, because the country is being punished, rightly, for its rogue nuclear weapons program. So for now, from the industry and law enforcement folks I spoke to, your best remedy is to try and be aware of it and prevent it happening to you. And that's tough. And it's a big leap to go from saying there's something fishy going on with this applicant to, I believe this applicant may be working for the North Korean government. That's like. That's a wild jump to make. But at least if you're looking for things, looking for those red flags or kind of looking for that circumstantial evidence, then you can protect yourself from being a victim.

[Noel King]

There is something about all of this, Bobby, that is just not particularly clever. It's working, but you don't have to have a beautiful mind to think up a scam like this one. I wonder, though, as you were reporting out this story, where your mind went when you thought about what are the perils in the future that we're facing? What doors are opened by this little scam that five years from now or 10 years from now might be even harder to combat?

[Bobby Johnson]

That, I think, is the most fascinating question in all of this. There are sort of two threads that I would pull here. One is that once they can get access, they're stepping stones, right? You know, they're just trying to do a job and earn money, but what if somebody else can use the same techniques and be more aggressive in their attacks? You know, if. If you get hired, let's say you get hired inside a government defense contractor you know, can you access intellectual property or state secrets or something like that? The espionage potential is high, and the kind of aggressive attacks on companies could, could get a lot worse. And then I think, you know, the second thread is just that it dramatically undermines trust in everything. Right. You know, we've, we already see deep fakes, we already see misinformation. We already see all kinds of ways of, of making you not believe the things that you see. And if you, if you can't even believe. Sorry, my computer screen just disappeared. I think it went on screensaver. I'm going to pick that one up.

[Noel King]

North Korea. Okay.

[Bobby Johnson]

Yeah, that's. I do get paranoid about these things sometimes now. Yeah, I think this, there is this fundamental problem of eroding trust that you can't believe what your eyes are seeing. You know, we see deep fakes happening all the time. We see misinformation. We see all these systems working to kind of separate you from reality and try and get you to second guess everything that you see. And that's important. You know, you don't want to fall for tricks, but the more prevalent they become, the more difficult it is to know what's real and what's not. And so if you are, you are stuck in a position where you can't be 100% sure that you know, the person on your company team phone call or zoom call, who doesn't like to put their camera on and doesn't talk very often, but they do the job. You know, if you start to believe that that person could be an operative of a foreign country, then, you know, you're getting really into some wild places in your thought process. And I think that undermining of reality is kind of the biggest existential problem here. And it's one. I don't know that there's a way to solve it. But we can all see how dangerous it can be to separate you from the truth.

[Noel King]

Bobby Johnson, investigative reporter. Gabrielle Burbay produced today's show. Amina Elsadi edited. Patrick Boyd is our engineer, and Laura Bullard checks the facts. I'm Noel King. It's Today explained.

[Bobby Johnson]

Sam.