An Arizona woman has been sentenced to more than eight years in prison for her role in a fraudulent scheme that helped North Koreans obtain remote IT positions at 309 US companies, including an unnamed member of the Fortune 500.
The FBI said victims included a top-five major television network, a Silicon Valley technology company, an aerospace manufacturer, an American carmaker, a luxury retail store, and a US media and entertainment company. Christina Marie Chapman, 50, and the North Korean IT workers reportedly netted more than $17.1 million via the scheme.
North Korea has long deployed thousands of its IT workers around the world, including in the US, to obtain remote employment using false, stolen or borrowed identities of US persons. These funds are then used to finance the activities of the East Asian country, which faces heavy economic sanctions globally.
In this case, which the FBI believes to be one of the largest of its kind ever recorded, the identities of 68 US citizens are believed to have been stolen. Chapman, a US citizen, conspired with and assisted the North Korean IT workers from October 2020 to October 2023. Using stolen and purchased identities of US nationals, the North Koreans applied for remote IT jobs at US companies and, in furtherance of the scheme, submitted falsified documents to the Department of Homeland Security on at least 100 occasions.
According to the FBi statement, Chapman used temporary staffing companies and other contracting organizations to evade companies’ pre-employment screening. She operated what’s known as a “laptop farm,” receiving and hosting computers from US companies at her home so that the companies would believe the workers were based in the United States. More than 90 laptops were seized from Chapman’s home following the execution of a search warrant in October 2023.
US Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro, who presided over the case, warned businesses to take the threat seriously.
“The call is coming from inside the house,” Pirro said. “If this happened to these big banks, to these Fortune 500, brand-name, quintessential American companies, it can or is happening at your company.”
She added: “Corporations failing to verify virtual employees pose a security risk for all. You are the first line of defense against the North Korean threat.”
Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, highlighted the far wider ramifications of this type of activity, saying how the illegal employment of North Korean IT workers abroad has “generated millions of dollars” for the dictatorship’s nuclear weapons program.
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