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The FBI is watching (hexbear.net)

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.

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[-] KobaCumTribute@hexbear.net 79 points 1 year ago

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?

[-] KobaCumTribute@hexbear.net 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] YearOfTheCommieDesktop@hexbear.net 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[-] Crowtee_Robot@hexbear.net 79 points 1 year ago

Alternate headline: Millions of workers have their wages sent to the US government to fund weapons programs. Every day. For decades.

[-] SpasmodicColon@hexbear.net 23 points 1 year ago

Millions of workers have their wages sent to the ~~US~~ Isntrael government to fund weapons programs. Every day. For decades

[-] sooper_dooper_roofer@hexbear.net 13 points 1 year ago

In the world's largest open-air concentration camp, the United States government holds an approximately 330 Million people hostage in a continent the size of China, siphoning away their hard earned wealth to fund weapons programs that kill People of Color across the world

[-] Tankiedesantski@hexbear.net 65 points 1 year ago

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. yeonmi-park

[-] FnordPrefect@hexbear.net 53 points 1 year ago

fedposting 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?

[-] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 28 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] FunkyStuff@hexbear.net 22 points 1 year ago

Giving money to landlords is supporting terrorism. From tenants, anything short of Maoist revolution is collaborationism. No, I will not explain.

[-] TerminalEncounter@hexbear.net 45 points 1 year ago

Weird round about way of justifying the end of remote work

[-] Sephitard9001@hexbear.net 45 points 1 year ago

That's weird, liberals told me in no uncertain terms just 2 weeks ago that North Koreans aren't allowed to leave so nice try lying FBI smuglord

[-] Phish@hexbear.net 36 points 1 year ago

They're allowed to leave as long as they go to St. Louis, which will undoubtedly cause them to miss North Korea terribly.

[-] Sephitard9001@hexbear.net 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

St. Louis has air ride sirens that go off whenever Mark Wahlberg is in town with his Shillelagh "Asia Slaya" yeonmi-park

[-] Evilsandwichman@hexbear.net 43 points 1 year ago

Wait, I thought North Koreans weren't allowed to leave? And if they did, they would defect? And if they left, they'd have access to the rest of the world and see what living in a normal society with internet and TV would be like? The North Korean government is stupidly incompetent; this sounds like a recipe for the birth of thousands of willing CIA assets. Also thousands of people spilling the beans anonymously to the news about the horrifying reality of life in North Korea. I'm sure that's exactly what happened too but I'm not hearing about it cause I haven't checked the news too closely; I mean it must have happened, we were promised about how the North Korean population are all basically the DPRK's prison population, eager for freedom.

Haha, can you imagine how dumb the average North Korean is because they definitely believe Kim Jong Un doesn't poop? Haha, dumb North Koreans, not like us smart Westerners. They can't even get haircuts unless it makes them look like the supreme leader!

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[-] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 35 points 1 year ago

How do they know that the money is specifically sent to missile programmes? Is there a DPRK ICMB Patreon or something like that?

[-] StellarTabi@hexbear.net 21 points 1 year ago

there is and the highest tier gets you early access to 일심단결은 주체혁명의 천하지대본, 필승의 무기! plus free 백두의 칼바람정신 자력부강, 자력번영, 경공업부문에서는 인민들이 좋아하는 여러가지 소비품들을 생산보장하자!, and my personal favorite, 모두다 찬성투표하자!

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[-] Wheaties@hexbear.net 32 points 1 year ago

Money is free speech when it's our businesses and political donors, but it stops being free speech when that's inconvenient for our foreign policy narrative.

[-] Aryuproudomenowdaddy@hexbear.net 32 points 1 year ago

Amazing how free Koreans learn IT while subsisting on a diet of rats.

[-] corgiwithalaptop@hexbear.net 29 points 1 year ago

Every thousand lines of code, the workers are allowed to take one small nibble of rat yeonmi-park

[-] Aryuproudomenowdaddy@hexbear.net 25 points 1 year ago

If a network outage is ongoing for more than 5 minutes they are fed to the rats that the rest of the workers eat. yeonmi-park

[-] corgiwithalaptop@hexbear.net 21 points 1 year ago

And it's hard for people to fix the servers since Lim Jong Un is the only one in the country with admin permissions

[-] GarbageShoot@hexbear.net 32 points 1 year ago

I feel like this can only mean workers in China sent money to their families and an income tax was applied

[-] BurgerPunk@hexbear.net 25 points 1 year ago

Thats my assumption here too.

"Remote IT workers in US funding US war machine through a nefarious channel called the IRS"

[-] chickentendrils@hexbear.net 29 points 1 year ago

big if troo!

rat-salute kim-drip rat-salute-2

[-] FloridaBoi@hexbear.net 24 points 1 year ago
[-] Tachanka@hexbear.net 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

glasses-off thousands of remote IT workers sent wages to North Korea to help fund weapons program.

glasses-on the nation we bombed to smithereens and embargoed for 73 years needs to seek extra-legal means of securing a national revenue. One of the forms this took was doing real labor generating surplus value for the American bourgeoisie and then sending their pittance wages back to the DPRK. We will use this as propaganda against them to justify hurting them even more. We are the baddies!

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[-] ComradeChairmanKGB@lemmygrad.ml 22 points 1 year ago

Based IT workers

[-] zed_proclaimer@hexbear.net 21 points 1 year ago

Fuck fuck fuck they caught me

[-] 2Password2Remember@hexbear.net 17 points 1 year ago

I wish someday to be 1/10 as based as this

Death to America

[-] blashork@hexbear.net 16 points 1 year ago

using juche necromancy to open a portal directly into the us treasury and funneling it all into a giant woodchipper like machine with one end labeled 'cash' and the other end 'magic missiles'

I hope great lich kim destroys the phylacteries of the US ghouls

[-] RyanGosling@hexbear.net 15 points 1 year ago

The west could’ve had thousands of skilled North Koreans working normally for them. But instead they forced the country into siege mode. They have no one to blame for the weapons program but themselves.

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[-] LeZero@hexbear.net 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Sounds a lot like every community of working immigrants, you can find a lot of places around here where I live where you can have a set up to wire money internationally, because yeah lots of immigrants send money back to their family home, a crazy concept for the brain geniuses of the FBI

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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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