North Korea, that isolated, Stalinist dictatorship run by a stunted little gargoyle with bad hair from a line of stunted little gargoyles with bad hair, is one of the poorest nations in the world. These are the fruits communism always brings, after all: Privation, hunger, even starvation, for all but the few, like the rotund Dear Leader, Kim Jong Un. North Korea has, in recent years, been seeking other ways to bring in badly-needed cash.
They should have been a little more careful about it.
The Justice Department today announced five guilty pleas and more than $15 million in civil forfeiture actions against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) remote information technology (IT) work and virtual currency heist schemes. The DPRK government uses both types of schemes to fund its weapons and other priorities in violation of sanctions.
I won't pretend to understand how the various virtual currency things work, but fortunately, the Justice Department seems to have people who are more familiar with its workings than the bad guys. The goblins were nothing, though, if not ambitious:
First, as described in court documents associated with the guilty pleas, facilitators in the United States and Ukraine assisted North Korean actors with obtaining remote IT employment with U.S. companies. For example, the facilitators’ provided their own, false, or stolen identities, and hosted U.S. victim company-provided laptops at residences across the United States to create the false appearance that the IT workers were working domestically. In total, these defendants’ fraudulent employment schemes impacted more than 136 U.S. victim companies, generated more than $2.2 million in revenue for the DPRK regime, and compromised the identities of more than 18 U.S. persons.
Second, as described in the two civil forfeiture complaints, a North Korean military hacking group known to the private sector as Advanced Persistent Threat 38 (APT38) carried out multimillion-dollar virtual currency heists at four overseas virtual currency platforms in 2023. While APT38 actors continued to launder their ill-gotten gains for these heists, the U.S. government froze and seized more than $15 million worth of virtual currency that it now seeks to forfeit for eventual return to the rightful owners.
It's a safe bet that some DOJ computer mavens are now working on back-hacking (is that still a term that computer people use) the North Korea efforts, maybe to shut down some servers, possibly plant some viruses - that would be an appropriate response, in addition to being pretty amusing.
Here's the thing: North Korea is a sad, comic-opera nation - but they have nuclear weapons.
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It's hard to know what to do about a problem like North Korea. Politically and economically, it's the short bus of nation-states. Amazingly, they have managed to stick around as long as they have. This announcement gives some hint as to how they are doing so, by criminal activity, along with some dribbles of patronage from China and Russia. None of that is a recipe for longevity in a nation.
Now, another attempt at grabbing some currency has fallen through. How much longer can the Norks last? The collapse of North Korea is not only inevitable but long overdue. We can only hope that when that collapse comes, the stunted little gargoyle won’t decide to go out in a blaze of glory by launching nukes or invading the South. And when they do collapse, it will be a massive project trying to redeem anything out of that country and its brainwashed, half-starved subjects.
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