Somewhere in a laptop farm in the United Kingdom, a North Korean operative is logging into a job he doesn’t have, at a company that doesn’t know he exists, doing work that funds a nuclear program. His manager thinks he’s one of the best on the team.
This is not a thriller. This is Tuesday.
A Financial Times investigation published today reveals that a coordinated network of North Korean IT workers has infiltrated hundreds of companies across the US and Europe — using AI deepfakes, stolen LinkedIn accounts, and large language models to pass interviews, forge credentials, and hold down multiple jobs simultaneously. The operation has generated an estimated $6.8 million for Pyongyang.
The scam works in stages. First, operatives steal or purchase dormant LinkedIn profiles, forge CVs, and recruit real humans — “facilitators” — to sit in on video interviews while AI filters handle the visual. Then the laptop sent to the new hire gets intercepted, logged into remotely, and put to work. Sometimes on several jobs at once.
When Google’s Threat Intelligence Group told one European client that a valued team member was actually a North Korean operative, the client’s response was telling: “Are you 100 per cent sure? Because he’s one of our best employees.”
Amazon says it has blocked more than 1,800 suspected North Korean operatives from being hired since April 2024. The company’s security chief noted they are increasingly targeting AI and machine learning roles specifically — which, in retrospect, makes a certain kind of sense.
Cybersecurity firm KnowBe4 was among the first to publicly admit it had been fooled. In that case the fake worker had attempted to load malware before being caught. The company, it bears noting, sells security awareness training.
The villain here is not the AI. The AI is just a tool — one that exposed every weakness in corporate recruitment that companies had been happy to ignore when it was inconvenient to fix. No in-person interviews. No identity verification. No security protocols in the hiring pipeline. Just a Zoom call, a strong CV, and the assumption that nobody would bother lying this elaborately.
They bothered.
Verdict: North Korea built a state-sponsored employment agency powered by artificial intelligence and funded by Western tech salaries. HR departments across two continents waved them through. The AI didn’t trick anyone. The companies tricked themselves.
