FBI arrests man and searches Laptops in 16 states for North Korea Tech fraud

FBI arrests man and searches Laptops in 16 states for North Korea Tech fraud

The US law enforcement agency arrested a man from New Jersey and searched several camps with laptop computers in a nationwide raid in 16 states. These measures aim to stop North Korea's efforts to secretly procure funds for their arms programs by using long -term workers, as the Ministry of Justice announced on Monday.

North Korea's secret technology operations

The role of American citizens

These developments are part of a number of national security cases that, according to FBI officials, offer only a little insight into the efforts of North Korea's efforts to use tens of thousands of overseas workers to generate regimes polluted by sanctions. American citizens play a key role in the alleged activities.

previous investigations and arrests

Last year already brought charges against a woman from Arizona who was involved in a scheme that compromised the identities of 60 Americans and affected 300 US companies, including a national television station as well as a leading technology company from Silicon Valley and an iconic US car manufacturer. A few months later, the FBI arrested a man from Tennessee, who allegedly helped North Korean workers to pretend to be a US citizen to give them jobs with American and British technology companies.

The laptop farms

In one of the cases announced on Monday, the prosecutors claim that several people in the United States, including one man from New Jersey, operate so-called laptop farms. They worked by accessing the laptops provided by the companies so that foreign IT workers could deceive the companies to live in the USA.

stolen data and currencies

The foreign IT workers were able to obtain sensitive information from the servers of these companies. An affected company is a non-named defense company based in California, which specializes in the development of AI-controlled devices and technologies. Six Chinese citizens and two Taiwanese citizens are also charged in this context and are currently on the run.

The stolen virtual currency

In a second case, the public prosecutors accuse four North Korean citizens of the conspiracy of stealing over $ 900,000 in virtual currency from a company in the USA and another in Serbia. The North Korea team then washed the money over foreign accounts.

long -term activities of North Korean labor

For years, North Korean workers have been using fake identities and sometimes existed in order to penetrate in American companies, both large and small. An earlier CNN examination showed that the founder of a California crypto startup unknowingly paid tens of thousands of dollars to a North Korean engineer. The entrepreneur only learned about the situation through the FBI.

The effects on American culture

The activities of North Korean illustrators and graphic designers also seem to have influenced the US animation studios without this being known to the companies concerned, independent researchers reported. These discovered a variety of cartoon sketches on an open computer server in the North Korean part of the Internet.