A federal court in St Louis has indicted 14 North Koreans for allegedly being part of a long-running conspiracy aimed at extorting funds from US companies and funneling money to Pyongyang’s weapons programmes.
The wider scheme allegedly involves thousands of North Korean IT workers who use false, stolen, and borrowed identities from people in the US and other countries to get hired and work remotely for US firms.
The indictement says the defendants and others working with them generated at least $88m (£51.5m) for the North Korean regime over a six-year period.
North Korea’s mission to the UN did not immediately reply to a request for comment from BBC News.
The prosecutors say the suspects worked for two North Korean-controlled companies – China-based Yanbian Silverstar and Russia-based Volasys Silverstar.
They were among a group of 130 North Korean IT workers employed by the two firms where they were internally referred to as “IT Warriors”, according to the US Department of Justice.
The suspects were allegedly ordered to seek salaries of $10,000 a month from their US employers.
On top of the monthly wage, they would also raise funds for the North Korean regime by stealing valuable company information and threatening to leak it unless the employer made an extortion payment.
The group is now facing wire fraud, money laundering, identity theft and other charges.
Aside from using stolen identities to avoid detection, prosecutors said they paid people residing in the US to receive, set up, and host laptops provided by the US employers.
They would then instruct those US residents to install remote access software allowing them to appear to be working from the US when they were actually overseas.
Investigators believe the suspects are in North Korea making it unlikely that they will ever face justice.
Still, the US State Department has announced that it will offer a reward of up to $5m for anyone who can provide more information on the suspects as well as Yanbian and Volasys.
US officials have not named the American companies targeted in the scheme.
“While we have disrupted this group and identified its leadership, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Ashley T. Johnson, special agent in charge of the FBI’s field office in St Louis.
“The government of North Korea has trained and deployed thousands of IT workers to perpetrate this same scheme against US companies every day.”
