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 mean could be. Where'd you get call-center workers tho?
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