Arizona woman to serve 8 years for identity theft scheme benefiting North Korea : NPR
The North Korean flag filed the North Korean Embassy in Beijing in July 2007.
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Peter Parks / AFP
An Arizona woman was sentenced to prison on Thursday for her role in a scam of $ 17 million who helped North Koreans steal the identities of the Americans and to use them to attract distant computer jobs in hundreds of American companies.
The judge of the American district court Randolph Moss ordered Christina Chapman to serve more than eight years behind bars for what the Ministry of Justice described in a press release as “one of the largest regimes of fraud of North Korean IT” that the agency has ever charged. The conspiracy lasted 2020 to 2023.
North Korea is under penalty of the United States – as well as the United Nations and several other countries – largely in response to isolated authoritarian weapons programs.
The departments of the State and the Treasury, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation accuse North Korea of deploying thousands of its International IT workers in order to bypass these sanctions and to contribute illegally to the North Korean economy.
“The North Korean regime has generated millions of dollars for its nuclear weapons program by victimizing American citizens, businesses and financial institutions,” said Deputy Director of the FBI, novel Rozhavsky, in a statement.
“However, even an opponent as sophisticated as the North Korean government cannot succeed without the help of American citizens arranged as Christina Chapman.”
The scam involved 68 stolen American identities, more than 300 American companies and two international companies. The affected companies included fortune companies 500: among others, an American car manufacturer, an aerospace manufacturer and a technological company in Silicon Valley, although the accusation act did not appoint specific companies.
The Ministry of Justice said that North Korean workers using stolen identities had also tried to be employed in two different government agencies – US immigration and customs application and the federal protection service – but failed.
She succeeded in the scam by exploiting a “laptop farm” at home, said the DoJ. There, she connected to the laptops of American companies to simulate that the employees really worked on American soil. She also dispatched dozens of laptops and other technologies abroad, including packages delivered in a Chinese city on the border of North Korea.
When the authorities searched his home in 2023, they found and entered more than 90 corporate devices.
A chapman lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
The authorities said that Chapman had been recruited by an unknown conspirator in 2020 via his LinkedIn page, who asked him to “be the American face” of their business.
In the sentence determination documents, the lawyers of Chapman said that it did not initially understand the gravity and the illegality of what it was doing. But when it has become clear that it was involved in reprehensible acts, they said, she continued with the scam to help pay her treatment as a terminal mother for kidney cancer.
In a letter to the judge, Chapman apologized for her actions and said that she would spend her time in prison in therapy and advisers to fight against past trauma.
“I myself faced identity theft and it took me 17 years to give me damage that it caused me,” she wrote. “Knowing that I had a part to cause this kind of stress and suffering for others made me feel deeply. My deepest and sincere apologies to anyone who has been injured by my actions.”
The DoJ has surveyed a number of cases in which North Korea has worked to defraud American companies to help finance their government. Last month, the ministry announced measures taken against such regimes, in particular an arrest, searches of 29 “laptop farms” known or presumed in 16 states, and the seizure of more than two dozen bank accounts “used to bleach illicit funds”.
