American sentenced for helping North Koreans get jobs at U.S. firms
133 comments
·July 24, 2025WorldPeas
tbrownaw
> I think it is a critical omission by this article of this woman's former homelessness.
"Person with no prospects takes too-good-to-be-true job offer that turns out to be helping do crime."
The specific details (homeless vs living with parents in a trailer park vs barely affording something etc) aren't really relevant. Any of those are roughly the same: someone in a shitty situation isn't careful enough when trying to get out of that situation.
The general situation (no prospects) is aiui fairly typical. Which makes it not news[1], and therefore not much of an omission at all much less a critical one.
[1] "Dog bites man" is not news; "man bites dog" is news.
dataflow
> The general situation (no prospects) is aiui fairly typical. Which makes it not news, and therefore not much of an omission at all much less a critical one.
Whether it is "news" or not affects whether you choose to report on the story. It is not relevant to the context you provide when you report on in the content of said story.
> "Dog bites man" is not news; "man bites dog" is news.
That's a headline, not the content. If a man ended up in jail because his hand was bloody, and you decide to report on it, it absolutely behooves you to mention that it was because a dog bit him, vs. letting readers wonder if he's some sort of criminal.
stevenwoo
Somewhat coincidentally, executive order today making homelessness a priority federal issue. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-orders-crackdown-home...
charlescearl
Executive order criminalizing homelessness. The order comes on the day I witnessed police disappear an unhoused person
red-iron-pine
you're gonna be seeing a lot more people disappearing in the next few year, mate.
they've given ICE more money than the FBI+DEA, or more than the entire Russian military.
barbazoo
I was thinking wealth inequality, mental health, etc.
> Trump orders crackdown on homeless encampments nationwide
He went another way, it’s almost comical if it weren’t so sad.
monero-xmr
There are some homeless people, screaming all day, addicted to drugs, defecating in their pants and in the street. These people do not deserve to live in the street. Having the “freedom” to do this where children walk on the sidewalk is actually completely insane. We live in a society. They need to be forcibly removed, put into asylums, given 24/7 care, and if they recover they can re-enter society.
Alternatively I would be amenable to putting them in, say, national parks, where they are given a tent and free food so they can scream all day there. Maybe it would be far enough away from transport that drug dealers wouldn’t bother to drive out there. But not in a major metropolis where normal people need to live and work. It’s absurd
Jensson
Read the first sentence for context, they aren't just being shooed away its to help them.
> President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order urging cities and states to clear homeless encampments and move people into treatment centers
JumpCrisscross
> this woman's former homelessness
Did she lift herself out of homelessness with this job? Or was she just homeless at one point in the past?
WorldPeas
It was this job that did it. If you watch her tiktoks she's almost bewildered that she is employed. It was beyond her comprehension what she did.
>Christina Chapman: I'm classified as homeless in Minnesota. I live in a travel trailer. I don't have running water. I don't have a working bathroom, and now I don't have heat.
>Annie Minoff: But Chapman's situation was about to turn around. In fact, the answer to her financial troubles had arrived just a few months before she posted that video in the form of a social media message.
>Robert McMillan: The message comes via LinkedIn. And it says, we're a foreign company looking for a US representative. That's really all we know about the message.
lostmsu
Why is it critical? Is there a causation link between homelessness and treason?
JumpCrisscross
> Why is it critical?
The root cause was desperation, not greed.
Doesn't change the effects of the action. And should be more or less legally irrelevant. But it does impact, in my view, the moral judgement they deserve.
joe_the_user
And should be more or less legally irrelevant. But it does impact, in my view, the moral judgement they deserve.
I suppose, if moral judgements and legality have no relation, sure. But what does that imply.
e_i_pi_2
OP does address why it's critical:
> Not that we need to re-litigate that homelessness as a national security issue
Without this it's easy to think that this was just a bad actor we could have caught, instead of just a symptom of a deeper issue not being addressed
I'd be more surprised if there isn't a causal link between homelessness and making bad choices - I don't think it's really disputed that there's a causal link between homelessness and crime in general.
fc417fc802
Amusingly, a significant fraction of people will read what you wrote as a causal link in a particular direction and agree with it. And a different fraction of people will read it as the link going in the other direction and also agree.
wahnfrieden
They're saying that having large numbers of a vulnerable and often disabled population on the brink of day to day survival is a national security risk because they are easily targeted and exploitable.
You don't need to find a causal relation to treason specifically to understand. They may not even be aware of what they are involved in.
moomin
You’re making a very good point here. We’ve always known that malign forces of various varieties will exploit the vulnerable in society, and we’ve definitely experimented with trying to imprison every last one of the vulnerable sucked into criminality. The War of Drugs has pretty definitively demonstrated this strategy doesn’t work. Poverty has been a national security issue for some time.
WorldPeas
exactly. It doesn't help that homeless individuals are usually disproportionately suffering from mental illness. In a more industrial economy they would fit the basic requirements for industrial production jobs, not saying that they are fulfilling, but now that the economy is centered around knowledge/service work, their disenfranchisement has increased greatly the bandwidth of the school to prison pipeline and schemes like this.
They have no reason to respect the American social contract because so far it's gotten them nothing, and in many cases like this, they are entirely unfamiliar with the stakes of the game as they stand now, as they are more concerned with the basic realities of their next meal and warmth. Her great move from the midwest(well I guess that used to be the west right) to the southwest indicates that not only was she likely adrift as many people are now, but open to anything that would keep her normed to the people she saw on her screens.
red-iron-pine
> national security risk because they are easily targeted and exploitable.
same reason FBI agents generally paid paid alright, and why federal government clearances take a strongly negative view of bankruptcy and poor financial management.
now it's writ-large across the population. yet more improvements brought to you by technology.
xboxnolifes
It's not even something that's unknown. There's a reason bad debts can get you denied a security clearance.
ericzawo
I cannot believe North Korean hackers are having better luck finding a job these days than I am.
viraptor
It's less individual NK hackers and more "an established, well funded interview cheating pipeline" that lands jobs.
servercobra
Yup it's definitely an organized group(s). I've gotten so many automated resumes that try different styles, locations, and keywords that I suspect are largely the same group or two. We even had one candidate join a Zoom as the wrong name (who had also applied!), realize his mistake, leave, and rejoin as the correct name.
aleph_minus_one
> It's less individual NK hackers and more "an established, well funded interview cheating pipeline" that lands jobs.
Just a shower thought: isn't it a missed business opportunity for recruiters from in particular other countries (but also the USA) to set up a similar "well-funded interview (cheating?) pipeline"?
arm32
I can't believe an actual engineer accepted this low of a salary!
Actual engineer:
markus_zhang
They are extremely talented. One of my Chinese friends told me that one of the interviewees he got knew enough about X11 to impress everyone, but then shocked them by showing on camera wearing NK uniform. Apparently he didn’t get the job.
truetraveller
Wow. Is this intelligence a one-off occurrence, or a pattern?
markus_zhang
I only know this occurrence. Maybe it is a pattern. From what I know, they operate from a hotel in a Chinese city semi-publicly (the locals know). Developers are not supposed to leave the hotel. The reason they are extremely talented can be partly explained by the training they received: years of system programming training with access to all kinds of source code.
Of course I have never seen this with my own eye, but this friend is the original CTO of Deepin Linux so I believe him. I don’t get the military uniform part though, as it scares away potential employers. Maybe this is one of the requirements of the Chinese government.
null
charliebwrites
It would be interesting to see what these hackers are doing in interviews such that they’re landing so many jobs
There’s probably even recorded interviews out there with the candidates as data
e40
The motivation might be to stay alive.
rdtsc
No doubt the NK comrades will take care of her and put extra cash in the prison commissary for chips and pretzels.
I wonder if she fully knew how much trouble she could get in and just thought she wouldn't get caught. Or, it was more of a "I am just helping out these nice fellers get jobs. No big deal, I am not bothering anyone" case.
0cf8612b2e1e
Were I perpetrating the scam, no way you let on that the workers are North Korean. Think it is entirely plausible she did not know. If they had said South Korean, who would challenge it?
sidewndr46
More accurately, how would a foreigner identify the difference between a resident of SK or NK? The only plausible way I could do it would be asking them to criticize the premiere of NK
yardie
When you hire a 10x developer who is literally 10x developers :-D
sampton
It's not that easy fronting a job. I can't imagine one person going through all the interviews and juggle all the communication. Might as well just start your own agency with contractors from India or Philippines.
throwmeaway222
You're name is Bill Smith?
예 I mean yes.
walrus01
From an infosec perspective here part of the problem is the many employers' corporation policy on work from home laptops. These laptops were either rigged with one of two things:
A) remote desktop software such as anydesk
Or
B) a kvm over IP device providing a virtual video, keyboard and mouse session to a remote user over html5/tls1.3
If it's option (b), unless this laptop farm operator had in their possession some special DPRK provided unit that identifies its USB manufacturer ID and device ID as something innocuous, this is a problem.
People are not using sufficiently tight endpoint security policies and logging to identify USB devices that identify themselves as kvm over IP bridges. Or just permit listing a certain set of allowed external USB keyboards and mice (company provided).
mittensc
You can bypass (b) pretty easily with a raspberry pi pico identifying as keyboard and mouse.
Change device id to the whitelisted ones.
Then use a hdmi to usb video capture and grab frames from that on the same pico.
That's something very easy to do.
quick cost is 14E, a pico (7E) plus usb to uvc (~7E)
vel0city
Its probably B.
And it doesn't have to be some special fancy device. Lots of open source KVM platforms out there let you choose whatever device ID appears for your keyboard and mouse. Here's how to make your PiKVM show up as whatever monitor, keyboard, mouse, cdrom, flash drive, whatever you want.
Unless you're not allowing anyone to use any kind of external monitor and you're not letting anyone use pretty generic and common external keyboard and mice your endpoint software is going to be pretty useless. Even if you give them a mouse and keyboard, all they have to do is tell the remote attackers "its a Logitech MK200 keyboard and mouse" and they can make the PiKVM look like a MK200 keyboard and mouse. Same if you try to limit it to only some specific monitor. EDID data can be easily faked, there's no cryptographic validation of USB device IDs or monitor EDID data at all.
0cf8612b2e1e
Serious question, if she had been a front for Americans or say German nationals - what would be the charges and sentencing?
kube-system
I don't know about Germans, but I do know Americans can legally work in America. There wouldn't be much of a "front" required.
0cf8612b2e1e
Maybe an American wants to be over-employed, has felony convictions, wants to work in ITAR field but married to Russian immigrant, whatever. Some reason to launder the identity.
How much worse is the crime because of North Korea? Would it be markedly different for Russia/Iran vs a formerly close ally like Canada.
8note
i expect its also a sanctions violation, not just fraud in this case.
gleenn
Maybe similar to how they caught Al Capone: tax evasion. Clearly they wouldn't be paying taxes.
colechristensen
>Chapman pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments.
Probably exactly the same crimes. Germans without the legal status to work in the US would probably be able to get bank accounts so the money laundering would probably just not be necessary.
null
globalnode
Thats why you have to look after your own people. If you weaken them and make them vulnerable to bad actors this sort of thing will happen. A good argument for a form of socialism no?
fortran77
Yes! We should be socialists like the strong empowered people of North Korea.
standardUser
Only 8 1/2 years? I guess this is what you'd call "light treason".
WorldPeas
I'm sure there was some sympathy for her former homelessness (unmentioned in this article). She was very much an unknowing actor who thought she was a "tech worker" and having never been part of this or around it likely thought her life was perfectly normal.
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-everyday-americ...
baobabKoodaa
And if the gig doesn't work out, there's always money in the banana stand, Michael.
dialup_sounds
Shout out to the person that already registered bananastand.ai, may your valuation be high and your acquisition be swift.
rwmj
Yes, arguably this is much worse than someone leaking documents to the Russians (Alrdich Ames got a life sentence), because it enables many people to become spies.
jjtheblunt
slight digression, but i recently read "treason" only is defined during wartime. not sure how to disambiguate that assertion, though.
colechristensen
For fraud, identity theft, and money laundering, sure. Especially because this really wasn't her plan, but I guess this is a case of somebody getting roped into something that there was pretty good evidence that the person should have known much better.
MrCoffee7
Non-paywalled article on this case: https://fortune.com/2025/07/24/north-korean-it-workers-chapm...
dang
Thanks! Since https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/american-sentenced-to-8-year... appears hardwalled and no one has supplied an archive link, I've switched the top URL to this.
I think it is a critical omission by this article of this woman's former homelessness. Not that we need to re-litigate that homelessness as a national security issue (though some more urgency may be nice), but this woman is not some unsympathetic traitor, most of what she was doing was over her head. If you watch a few of her tiktok videos, she doesn't seem to clued into what's happening and happy to be normal. It's a shame that it came to this, but I imagine this has happened in other cases that didn't involve state-actors.
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-everyday-americ...