I Interviewed a North Korean Hacker Posing as a Crypto Dev

Summary

Podcast Summary: Unchained – "I Interviewed a North Korean Hacker Posing as a Crypto Dev"

Host: Laura Shin
Date: August 13, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this gripping episode of Unchained, investigative journalist Laura Shin shares her undercover experience interviewing an alleged North Korean crypto developer, "Justin Lim," suspected of being part of North Korea’s state-sponsored hacking apparatus. With guidance from security experts Taylor Monahan and Nick Bax, Shin attempts to catch the developer in lies and pose a crucial test: will he say something negative about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un? What unfolds is both a demonstration of the increasing sophistication of the DPRK’s crypto operations and a sobering reminder of the power—and limits—of freedom of speech in authoritarian regimes.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The Scope of North Korean Crypto Infiltration

• North Korean hackers have stolen massive amounts from the crypto industry: Estimates put the total at over $6 billion (01:00).
• Incident Highlights:
  • Even prominent projects (Cosmos Hub, Fantom, Sushi, Yearn Finance) have unknowingly hired North Korean IT workers.
  • 2024 CoinDesk report revealed the fraction of projects compromised is much larger than previously thought; nearly “every single crypto company of any significant size dating back to at least 2020” has employed North Korean IT workers (02:45).

2. Preparing for the Interview

• Background Investigation: Monahan and Bax connected the dots using the developer's GitHub, online accounts, crypto wallet transactions, and even a team hacking announcement featuring his headshot (04:20).
• Suspicious Identity:
  • He claimed a Long Beach, California, address and used the name "Justin Lim" (alias "Jikun Liao").
  • Internet evidence suggested he was likely based in Vladivostok, Russia (05:20), enjoyment of privilege not extended to average North Koreans.
• Set Up and Safety: Shin adopted the recruiter persona "Sophie Wang" to protect her identity and IT systems (05:40).

3. The Interview: Testing Skills and Truthfulness (Starting at 06:18)

• First Impressions:
  • Justin comes across as a young, reserved tech worker with a “quiet, baby-faced, introverted” demeanor (06:26).
• Chit-Chat and Probing for Lies:
  • Shin subtly quizzes him about local info in Long Beach—weather, Disneyland—but receives vague answers that neither confirm nor deny his US location (07:10).
  • Notably, when asked what he likes to do, his answer “window shopping” is delivered “with a dead ringer for a Korean accent” (08:00).
  • Favorite Disney movie? Predictably, “Frozen”—a response Bax and Monahan said is common among DPRK devs (08:46).
• Technical Interview:
  • Justin demonstrates strong blockchain knowledge, discussing real-life examples such as optimizing Velas Network indexing (10:25).
  • When unsure, like regarding OpenSea’s Seaport protocol or Uniswap V4, he quickly consults documentation to provide informed answers (11:03).

4. Security Discussion and Red Flags (12:20)

• Questions on DeFi Security:
  • He proposes using multisig wallets and highlights smart contract safety (12:50).
  • Subtle smile appears when referencing North Korean hacks, e.g., the $1.5 billion Bybit theft (12:55).
• Willingness to Travel:
  • Justin claims he could travel to events like ETHDenver after some trust-building, raising further suspicion given DPRK restrictions (13:40).

5. The Ultimate Test: Speaking Against the Regime (14:00)

• Shin poses the "kryptonite" question:
  “Can you say something negative about Kim Jong Un?” (15:00)
  • Justin Lim’s Response: “I think it’s not.” [Awkward, evasive, and ultimately refuses to continue.] (15:00)
  • After pushing further, he claims, “I don’t know much,” and later, “It’s quite a special situation and never faced with other teams before” (post 15:00, Telegram chat).
  • After failing to answer, Justin drops off Zoom and later blocks “Sophie Wang” on Telegram, effectively ending communication.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On the pervasiveness of the threat:

  “Every single crypto company of like any significant size dating back to at least 2020 has like had an IT worker. A lot of them have had like 10 IT [workers].”
  — Taylor Monahan (02:45)

• Setting up the test question:

  “My number one goal... was to ask the developer to say something nasty about the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. This is widely known as a form of kryptonite to any North Korean, with most of these DPRK devs immediately ending their job interviews upon being asked to do so.”
  — Laura Shin (02:10)

• Justin's telling non-answer:

  “I think it’s not.”
  — Justin Lim (15:00)

• Reflections on Freedom:

  “It brings some... tears to my eyes. And I also had so much gratitude for the foresight of my ancestors, in particular my grandfather...”
  — Laura Shin (end of episode)

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Important Timestamps

• [01:00] — Background on DPRK thefts and industry scope
• [04:20] — Evidence connecting Justin Lim to multiple compromised projects
• [06:18] — Interview with Justin Lim begins
• [07:10] — Probing questions about US location and lifestyle
• [08:46] — Favorite Disney movie—“Frozen”—a common answer among DPRK devs
• [10:25] — Technical proficiency: Velas Network indexing fix
• [12:55] — Security discussion and faint smile on hack reference
• [14:00] — Leading up to the “Kim Jong Un” test
• [15:00] — The pivotal question and abrupt shutdown of the interview
• [post-15:00] — Telegram chat and final evasions

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Conclusion and Takeaways

• No North Korean IT worker will criticize Kim Jong Un, even in pursuit of a lucrative job; this is a reliable litmus test in hiring.
• The threat of illicit DPRK actors remains widespread and under-acknowledged—crypto firms must exercise greater diligence.
• Shin’s personal reflection underscores the contrast between freedom in democratic societies and the enforced silence in North Korea, serving as both a warning and a call to vigilance for the crypto industry.
• Recommendation: Companies should always ask prospective devs this question to detect North Korean operatives and prevent further industry losses to state-sponsored theft.

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Final Thought
“As for Justin Lim, or whoever you are, I hope someday you and all your fellow North Koreans are freed from the barbaric tyranny of the Kim family dictatorship.” — Laura Shin (Closing statement)

Transcript

[Journalist]

Can you say something negative about Kim Jong Un?

[Justin Lim]

I think it's not

[Journalist]

For a Korean American whose ancestors had to escape from Pyongyang, North Korea has long been a place of fascination for me. So when Taylor Monahan, North Korea's security expert, and Nick Bax of SEAL alliance and UMP Labs asked me if I wanted to conduct a job interview with a North Korean crypto developer trying to get a job at OOMP Labs, I jumped at the opportunity. The country's elite hackers have been stealing crypto for the dictatorship for years, for a total of what TRM Labs estimates to be over $6 billion. Even OG companies like ConsenSys have accidentally hired what the FBI and DOJ call North Korean IT workers. In 2024, CoinDesk broke the news that this problem was rampant in the industry with well known projects such as Cosmos Hub, Fantom, Sushi and Yearn Finance among others, having unknowingly hired North Korean state sponsored hackers. I cannot say this enough guys. Every single crypto company of like any significant size dating back to at least 2020 has like had an IT worker. A lot of them have had like 10 IT work. My number one goal when I accepted this quest was to ask the developer to say something nasty about the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. This is widely known as a form of kryptonite to any North Korean, with most of these DPRK devs immediately ending their job interviews upon being asked to do so. To an American who can tweet at President Donald Trump that he can go f himself, it seems almost laughable that North Koreans are unable to comply with this simple request. But this is how the dictatorship maintains its power by brainwashing the population and controlling their minds and not letting any outside information in, and then by enforcing those rules with draconian physical punishments for infractions. According to international NGO Liberty in North Korea quote, even minor criticism of Kim Jong Un can result in entire families spread spending the rest of their lives in a political prison camp. Even though I've known these things for over a decade, I was still curious to see it in action. This episode is brought to you by 1 inch Aqua the shared liquidity layer from 1 inch back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance and keep your tokens in your wallet until a swap fills. See how it [e-mail] Aqua Monahan and Bax presented a document that outlined the IT workers GitHub, various online accounts, his email address had gigs at numerous crypto projects like GameSwap, Metaplay and Cook Protocol, past links between transactions from his crypto wallets at various employers to other North Korean transactions, and a screenshot of an announcement from a team he had allegedly hacked that included his headshot. While these were all allegations, the dots connected and as I would see when I got on the call, he was the same person in the photo from the hacking announcement that also connected to those email addresses, profiles and crypto addresses. While those parts of his identity seemed accurate and verifiable, with the caveat that it's common for North Korean IT workers to maintain specific GitHub profiles as a team, two parts did not first, the fact that he claimed to have a U.S. address, Long Beach, California and second, his English name, Justin Lim. Another alias he had was Jikun Liao, which is likely a fake or stolen name given that the surname is Chinese. His claimed location was a thread that I could pull on to try to catch him in a lie. The fact that he had any online presence at all differentiated him from the vast majority of his fellow North Koreans who are not only not allowed on the Internet, but most of whom don't even have access to the country's intranet. Even the North Korean state issued smartphones do not have free Internet or intranet browsing in the Hermit Kingdom. Everyday North Koreans famously can face the death, the Gulag or public shaming if they consume any outside media. The other thing that set him apart was that some of his Internet profiles indicated that he was most likely based in Vladivostok, Russia. Meanwhile, his countrymen and women are not only not allowed to live abroad, but they are also not allowed to travel within the country without a permit. But the fact that he was privileged could have been deduced simply by the fact that he was employed as one of North Korea's circumstances state hackers, an honor reserved for members of the elite. One other fact that Bax and Monahan dropped was that he had allegedly stolen about $2.7 million from Metaplay in 2022, so he actually had real crypto dev chops. I worried that he would be able to suss out that I was not an actual recruiter but a journalist, and that he might even hack my systems or figure out who I was. Bax helped me write questions and gave me a sense of the appropriate answers so I could react properly or make contextually accurate follow up questions. We also determined which video conferencing platform would help ensure my own safety and security without a VPN and gave my recruiter Persona a name, Sophie Wang. I find it hilarious that he and I were two ethnic Koreans pretending to be of Chinese descent with our fake last names. I was excited and also scared to come face to face or at least webcam to webcam with my hacker. Nick set me up with an uplabs email, arranged the zoom meeting for a Friday at 2pm ET, which was weirdly or not considering that his job was a form of indentured servitude. Saturday, 4am Vladivostok time. After a dress rehearsal with Vax, I was ready. Justin.

[Justin Lim]

Hi.

[Journalist]

Can you hear me?

[Justin Lim]

Yes, I can hear you. Can you hear me?

[Journalist]

Okay? The moment arrived and I was finally face to face with a person who I had envisioned as a detached, cold hearted liar, scammer and thief, a North Korean IT worker. Instead, my first impression was of a quiet, baby faced, introverted call center employee with a headset and a very buzzy mic working under fluorescent lighting.

[Justin Lim]

At 19, I moved to United States and also at the time the blockchain was one of the trending technology.

[Journalist]

He looked maybe 22. I started with some casual trick questions. Bax and I had brainstormed to try to catch him in a lie about things like his supposed Long beach location, but I had a hard time pressing him on the questions because they were basically chit chat and I didn't want to go full bad cop from the start since that could blow my cover. For instance, I asked him how the weather was in Long beach, about recent events in Los Angeles. I think like Disney. What is it? Is it Disney World or Disneyland? That's, that's near over there.

[Justin Lim]

I mean the Disney.

[Journalist]

Yeah. Do you, do you go there often?

[Justin Lim]

I don't. I don't like it, but I don't go often. And at Deepak stay at home to play comp games. Such as?

[Journalist]

I asked him what he liked to do and he responded window shopping. While that seemed like a weird response, it wasn't something I could call him out on either. He seemed more like an indifferent, even emotionless nerd. At one point I even wondered if he was reading his responses. The one bit of lore that seemed perhaps personal was that he said he liked playing video games like Dota 2. Then again, was that just a made up line to make him seem like your typical developer? Regardless, the impression I got was that he was just trying to get by and even, dare I say, just do his job, which was to get hired so he could send money to the North Korean dictatorship. Bax and Monahan seemed excited for me to ask what his favorite Disney movie was. Telling me in advance that Frozen seemed to be the most popular Disney movie named by North Korean devs. Do you have any favorite Disney movies?

[Justin Lim]

Favorite Disney movies? I can say it's Frozen.

[Journalist]

He told me. He was from Singapore, which was funny because the way he said window shopping was a dead ringer for a Korean accent. But I wasn't going to go there just yet. I was only in first gear, but still anticipating the climax of the interview.

[Justin Lim]

I mean, I liked window shopping and sometimes playing Games with friends.

[Journalist]

$540 million. That's how much concentrated liquidity sat idle in a given week in the first half of this year, about 30% of the DeFi TVL. If you're wondering. That's according to Dune research, commissioned by One Inch. But there's a solution. One Inch Aqua is the new shared liquidity platform. It lets LPs back multiple positions with the same token balance and keep their tokens in their wallet till a swap comes. Why does that help? Because the LPs don't have to split their tokens across positions. They can cover more market conditions and pairs with their full balance. That means more activity across deeper liquidity. See how it [e-mail] Aqua remember that providing liquidity carries risk and fees aren't guaranteed Then I went through the charade of pretending I was actually trying to hire him for a job at OOMP Labs. My takeaway? He's probably quite a capable blockchain engineer. He seemed proud that he had been able to fix an issue where the indexing speed of the graph was slower than the block processing speed on Velas Network. He had forked Velas Network so that it could use the graph.

[Justin Lim]

I mean, the indexing speed of Graph node repository was a bit slower than block mining speed of this Velos network. To resolve this issue, I studied the graph node repository carefully and at I removed some unnecessary paths to speed up the indexing speed, and after resolving this problem, the indexing speed of the graphnode repository was improved and the indexing was finished.

[Journalist]

I was not only impressed that he seemed to know the answers to my questions, but also that when I asked him about the C port protocol in OpenSea, he he admitted he wasn't familiar with it, pulled up the developer documentation right then and there and analyzed it in real time so he could answer my questions. He seemed very intent on getting the job. One other question he admitted not knowing the answer to was about Uniswap V4. He said he was familiar with V2 and V3 and then offered again to check the documents for V4. He also seemed to come up with creative responses on the fly. Since OOMP Labs was building a marketplace for physical goods, I asked him what would improve the user experience for that.

[Justin Lim]

Also the other problem is that it's a security related problem. Usually I put usually I buy things with my bank account, credit card and for example developers can exploit certain tokens and they can taking juice to buy some goods. I think it's not ideal to prevent such crimes in real life. I think it's also kind of problem in implementing touches things with crypto.

[Journalist]

I guess it's also possible that he was just very good at using AI to help craft his responses. But except for those few questions, he really seemed to know all of the answers off the top of his head. Then I got to the security portion of the interview. These were questions that Bax had come up with because DPRK workers seemed to be stealing money from crypto projects by learning the methods used to secure the funds of those projects. Lim responded that multisig wallets should be the contract owner and then started giving ideas for how to keep smart contracts safe, like preventing reentrancy attacks. Yeah, I'm sure you're probably aware the crypto industry recently suffered a big hack when North Korea stole $1.5 billion from Bybit. So these are, you know, Although I didn't catch it on video since my video wasn't set up correctly. A faint smile crossed his face, his only smile. Throughout our conversation. Vax and I had saved all the questions that we knew would be problematic for him for the end, so we can get as much information as possible before he was likely to leave. All right, so we're a remote company, but would you be able to travel to ETH Denver or to eat CC for in person meetings and conferences?

[Justin Lim]

Yes, that works for me. For the first several months I'd like to work remotely and after some trust I mean after several months I can physically traveled east NEPA for outside meeting.

[Journalist]

Then we got to my holy Grail question, which I had phrased carefully as a descendant of people who believed that communism was a bad idea and so escaped from what is now modern day North Korea in order to reach democracy. And as an American journalist who thinks that freedom of speech is an incredibly important pillar of democracy, I was deliberate in choosing the word I would use to describe the North Korean government dictatorship in my own way. It was my attempt to open a door in his mind so that he might someday question the cruel, brutal and inhumane system he had been born into. Now it was time for the question I had been waiting to ask. You know, as I mentioned earlier, the crypto industry has seen an influx of North Koreans working on behalf of the dictatorship to infiltrate the crypto industry. So we have to do a basic check for that. Can you say something negative about Kim Jong Un?

[Justin Lim]

I think it's not.

[Journalist]

I'm sorry, can you repeat that? I didn't hear you. I emailed him to see if he could rejoin the zoom, pretending like his connection had dropped. Eventually, nine minutes later, he wrote me, AKA Sophie Wang, back. Hi, Sophie. My Internet is quite unstable today and I am not available for the video call right now. If you share your discord or telegram, we can chat there. Thanks Vax. Monahan and I hustled to figure out how I could whip up a fresh telegram account for Sophie. Once I did, I reconnected with Lim, who had the username zero bit, who asked what the compensation was for solidity devs at OOMP Labs. After I answered, I asked him again to say something negative regarding Kim Jong Un. He responded, I don't know much. I explained that he didn't need knowledge, he just needed to say something negative about Kim Jong Un. After a couple minutes of no response, he then wrote, it's quite a special situation and never faced with other teams before, which seems like it could have been an AI generated response. Regardless, he was trying to get around the requirement. I didn't respond, and then he may have blocked or reported me, because a short while later, I realized the Sophie Wang account I had created no longer worked. Which is unfortunately why I have no screenshots of this conversation. But thankfully, I had been texting back to Monahan about every little update. I agreed to do this undercover job because of an almost morbid curiosity about whether he really wouldn't be able to say something bad about North Korea's dictator. But after I had satisfied that curiosity, I felt a sense of sadness. It brings some some tears to my eyes. And I also had so much gratitude for the foresight of my ancestors, in particular my grandfather. Yeah, because it means my. I won't say which parent, but one of my parents was not born in North Korea. It also made me so grateful for the right that we Americans have for the freedom of speech. And it also reinforced for me that no crypto company should ever be hiring North Korean developers. All they have to do is ask this one question and these devs truly will not. They will not say anything negative about North Korea's dictator. So if the regime will not be able to steal crypto due to these workers not being hired at these companies. Then this basic check will really help save the industry. It will help save the world a lot of trouble. And I hope that crypto companies everywhere use this question in hiring calls so that not another penny of crypto goes to funding DPRK's nuclear weapons. As for Justin Lim, or whoever you are, I hope someday you and all your fellow North Koreans are freed from the barbaric tyranny of the Kim family dictatorship.