The US Justice Department has indicted five individuals, including two North Koreans and two American citizens, for raising finances for the North Korean regime.
They generated at least $866,255 from 10 companies, most of which was laundered through a Chinese bank account, said the department.
North Koreans Jin Sung-Il and Pak Jin-Song, Mexican national Pedro Ernesto Alonso De Los Reyes, and US citizens Erick Ntekereze Prince and Emanuel Ashtor were indicted for participating in a fraudulent scheme to secure remote IT jobs with US companies, generating revenue for North Korea, according to a department statement.
The group worked for 64 companies between April 2018 and last August.
The FBI arrested Ntekereze and Ashtor and searched Ashtor’s North Carolina home, where he ran a “laptop farm” to make companies believe they had hired US-based workers, according to the statement.
North Korea “dispatched thousands of skilled IT workers to live abroad, primarily in China and Russia, with the aim of deceiving US and other businesses worldwide into hiring them as freelance IT workers to generate revenue for the regime,” said the department.
Due to its nuclear program, North Korea has been one of the world’s most sanctioned nations since 2006. The sanctions have been imposed by the United Nations as well as unilaterally by the US.