https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-weapons-program-it-workers-f3df7c120522b0581db5c0b9682ebc9b
Court documents allege that the government of North Korea dispatched thousands of skilled IT workers to live primarily in China and Russia with the goal of deceiving businesses from the U.S. and elsewhere into hiring them as freelance remote employees.
What are the odds this is actually just “some immigrant workers from the DPRK got jobs at call centers, and sent money home to their families which was then taxed by the DPRK or otherwise spent in ways that ended up paying the state in some fashion,” instead of a real conspiracy by state agents to provide call center workers in exchange for a portion of their extremely low wages?
I was just grasping for a succinct way of describing a low-wage remote service farm outfit and “call center” was just the shortest and most generic way of phrasing it so it wouldn’t mess up the flow of the line (I started with “outsourced IT farm” and it read kind of wonky so I changed it). Although “outsourced remote IT work for US businesses” sounds a whole lot like a way of spicing up a description of call center work, especially since the accusation isn’t that they were backdooring US systems to steal from them just sending part of their wages back home.
I mean it could just as easily be programmers, server admins, etc. In fact it seems far more likely than a customer service role where having an accent is pretty noticeable. They do say “skilled” workers
but yeah, its hardly nefarious for a country embargoed by the world to train workers to go abroad where they can earn higher wages in useful foreign currencies
Alternate headline: Millions of workers have their wages sent to the US government to fund weapons programs. Every day. For decades.
In North Korea they don’t have computers or the internet, so to train IT workers they sit in a big auditorium and listen to one person read zeros and ones off a big book through a megaphone.
See?! They’re transferring money. It must be for missiles!
lol, the DPRK has a single account for ballistic missiles that everyone transfers to or something? Did the workers put ‘nukes’ down in their Venmo?
US gov stole money that I transferred to my landlord once. No explanation. Closest I could come to an explanation was that his name sounded likely to be Muslim. I must have been supporting terrorism, I guess.
Weird round about way of justifying the end of remote work
