Thousands of North Korean IT developers used false identities to contract with U.S. companies for years to perform remote outsourcing work , FBI and Justice Department officials said, according to the Associated Press . The wages earned by these developers were secretly transferred to North Korea for weapons development-the Ballistic Missile Program.
The FBI announced that it had seized $1.5 million and 17 domain names as part of the investigation, which is still ongoing.
Court documents allege that the North Korean government dispatched thousands of skilled IT developers, primarily based in China and Russia, to deceive businesses in the United States and elsewhere into hiring them as freelancers working remotely.
Jay Greenberg, special agent in charge of the FBI's St. Louis field office, said the developers used various tactics to make it appear they were working in the United States, including paying Americans to use their home wireless connections . He added that any company employing IT developers on a freelance basis was "likely" employing someone on the scheme.
North Korean IT developers are said to be paid millions of dollars a year and, in some cases, infiltrate the computer networks of companies that employ them and steal relevant information, maintaining access to future hacking and extortion schemes.