Shocking FBI Reward – $5 Million for Info on 14 North Koreans Stealing U.S. Jobs and Secrets

The U.S. government has offered a reward of up to five million dollars for information related to North Korean IT companies based in China and Russia involved in the overseas dispatch of North Korean IT personnel and money laundering.

CNBC and other media outlets reported on Thursday that the U.S. Department of Justice has indicted fourteen North Koreans for allegedly working under false identities at U.S. IT companies and remitting money back to North Korea.

The suspects are accused of using stolen American identities to apply for jobs, hiring U.S. citizens to impersonate them in video interviews and meetings, creating fake websites to deceive employers, and stealing sensitive company information for extortion and blackmail.

The U.S. government has issued FBI wanted notices for all 14 suspects, who could face up to twenty-seven years in prison. The Department of State also offered a reward of up to five million dollars for information leading to their capture.

Michael Barnhart, lead analyst for Google Cloud Mandiant’s North Korea Threat Hunting Team, warned that more North Korean operatives are securing jobs in Western companies to launch more sophisticated attacks.

Google Cloud Mandiant reports that these North Korean agents created remittance service accounts to receive wages from U.S. employers, which were then transferred to North Korean-controlled bank accounts in China. Their extortion and blackmail tactics are also evolving.

Barnhart noted that Mandiant has observed a significant increase in extortion attempts by North Korean IT operatives in recent months. He highlighted that the new tactic involves publicly releasing sensitive data from targeted organizations to pressure victims into paying substantial ransoms in unprecedented amounts of cryptocurrency.

He also added that recent indictments of key figures in North Korean IT organizations signal that law enforcement efforts need to broaden to effectively disrupt these illegal operations. These legal actions target the masterminds behind these schemes, dismantle their support infrastructure, and create barriers to their ongoing activities. They aim to ensure that they can no longer operate anonymously or under aliases in obscure locations.