A federal court in St Louis has indicted 14 North Koreans for allegedly being part of a long-running conspiracy aimed at extorting funds from US companies and funneling money to Pyongyang’s weapons programmes.
The wider scheme allegedly involves thousands of North Korean IT workers who use false, stolen, and borrowed identities from people in the US and other countries to get hired and work remotely for US firms.
The indictement says the defendants and others working with them generated at least $88m (£51.5m) for the North Korean regime over a six-year period.
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The prosecutors say the suspects worked for two North Korean-controlled companies - China-based Yanbian Silverstar and Russia-based Volasys Silverstar.
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Oh no! People making money by … checks notes … working for it!!
No, I don’t care that they are doing it for a communist regime bent on developing nuclear weapons. The only consistent result of depriving rogue states of money and trade is the starvation of their people. Its a little hard to overthrow or reform a government on an empty stomach.
… involves thousands of North Korean IT workers who use false, stolen, and borrowed identities from people in the US and other countries …
These people didn’t work to earn money their families, they worked for the regime using stolen identities. North Koreans are not even allowed to get in touch with companies (or individuals) in the West, let alone work for them.
… and yet, North Koreans did this work, and I addressed the money issue from the regime-level down.
Stealing Identities to get work does not imply the ruined the credit of those people. Getting worked up over this is NOT all that far off from getting worked up over immigrant laborers stealing identities so they can work and feed their families, or recieve food stamps or medical care. At least those last two kinda-sorta have victims, and yet I still prefer immigrants be able to eat.
Sorry, you’re not going to be able to get me to buy into the fear-mongering hysteria-machine by apeing thier narratives. I’m not saying your arguments are invalid, just addressing them from the same surface-level reading you gave mine.
These people didn’t work to ‘feed their families’. Their families likely didn’t benefit at all from this scheme.
How do you know?
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It is impossible for civilians to do this. In an absolute sense.
I know of nothing whatsoever that proves this. The article certainly doesn’t clarify anything to that effect.
Lastly, the aggressive countering nature of this comment was unnecessary if you were merely seeking clarification.
It was four words, without any emphasis. I deliberately wrote my comment to be simple and calm. Any aggression you’ve interpreted is on you, not me, and I suspect you only read it that way due a to a pre-existing negative opinion of me.
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Repeating the same tired gibberish with no elaboration, much?
These aren’t ‘common’ IT workers seeking a job but spies working for North Korea as the article says. What should I elaborate here?
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Rather spies, soldiers, whatever, work remotely for western companies than whatever other bull their government wants them doing.
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… and? Yeah, welcome to the thread. At what point do I say otherwise?
Starving the regime is not an excuse to starve the country. The regime doing anything that brings in more money than it spends is a better use of its time than other things it tries to do, and will continue attempting regardless of cash-flow.
Call me when you’re ready to impiment a no-fly zone and mass air-dropping/smuggling of Starlink, Cell Phones, Cell Towers(stand-alone, like the Stinger, only in reverse), weapons, and most importantly, food.
Are you ready to do something about the problem of starving North Koreans, or do we just continue blaming it entirely on their government?
… yeah, that will show them. Meanwhile, do you even begin to understand how food is distributed within North Korea?
India and Pakistan, circa 1998 … You’re telling us the world ended because we didn’t starve them all out.
I don’t think anyone is disputing that they shouldn’t be stealing identities, but are they in fact doing the work they’re being paid for? That’s just called having a job. It’s not like the US government isn’t using tax money to fund its continued arms development, including nukes.
These people didn’t work to earn money their families, they worked for the regime
Given that in North Korea military jobs are the most stable ways to provide for your family, I’d say both are likely true.
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I don’t particularly feel sympathy for those who feel it is justified and righteous to join such an endeavour such as its military for the same of ‘feeding families’.
In the end every horrible deed done for gain by people who have people they care for can be said to be done for ‘feeding families’ in this sense.
This isn’t equivalent to people getting rich by doing bad stuff, this is literally people who would be starving otherwise, like many others in NK are. And doing remote tech work isn’t a “horrible deed”. You have to actually apply nuance. You can’t run to “anyone who works for the NK government for any reason is bad.” This is the same logic that Israel uses to call the Gaza Health Ministry and other civil services “combatants”.
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In my situation it is their fight for luxury
Then your situation is not the same. They’re not fighting for “luxury”, they are also fighting for basic sustenance.
Frankly, I’m not going to take anyone but other North Koreans’ opinion on condemning this. We can both (clearly) converse on Beehaw without being arrested or killed. And no matter how you keep avoiding the point, doing illegal remote tech work and handing the paycheck directly to the government, is not any different than doing legal remote tech work and handing taxes directly to the government.
Governments get money, governments build weapons.
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Depending on the validity of the article, they also did a little extortion in addition to just working, so not just having a job. Not saying that wasn’t part of their job on the NK side, but the salary wasn’t the only money involved.
A federal court in St Louis has indicted 14 North Koreans for allegedly being part of a long-running conspiracy aimed at extorting funds from US companies and funneling money to Pyongyang’s weapons programmes.
Not gonna lie, I don’t really feel comfortable these days taking a U.S. courts’ word on this. Sounds more likely to me that this is just a result of companies that happen to be run from North Korea and that this only “[funnels] money to Pyongyang’s weapons programmes” in the same way that buying something off Amazon “funnels” money to DARPA.
In which case, this only really makes sense to get mad at if you find yourself having particular hate for things like “the North Korean economy having slightly more money in it,” or “U.S. sanctions getting bypassed.” Personally, I don’t care about either. The use of stolen identities is awful if true, sure, so I get being mad about that, but that happens plenty enough domestically, so I’m not really sure why it’s particularly deserving of a news article here.
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I have already expressed my doubts as to the trustworthiness of the article’s sources regarding the companies in question being controlled by North Korea directly, so I don’t understand why you’d reference the very same article as a justification as to why my suspicions are wrong.
The rest of your post is a lot of stuff that I’ve heard time and time again. Things like “North Korea is a dystopian hellscape where everyone is dying to leave or dying outright” is the kind of thing that I keep seeing people state as though it’s common sense. That is to say, it’s obvious, and needs no further thought or consideration. And the way NK is described, you’d think it was the perfection of totalitarianism, with scarcely any flaws in its population control. I find this level of success a difficult sell. This is all worsened by the fact that the United States has a vested interest in people believing that places like China and NK are basically Mordor. Put them all together, and I’d hope you can see why I might not take this all at face value.
But I’m honestly not interested in debating if North Korea’s really as hellish as so many have said. I think it’s an awful country with an awful, dictatorial government, and whether or not it’s as awful as is claimed is not something I care for. I can’t fix the place.
But I do care for the defaulting assumption of bad faith on my part and repeated uncharitable readings of my posts. I at no point ever made any claims about Tardigrada, nor have I cast any doubt upon their character anywhere in this thread. My criticisms were aimed squarely at the article and the sources it used. Coming back to this thread to see paragraphs written at me and everyone else with a similar opinion to me that do feel like they cast doubt upon my character is not a fun thing to see in my inbox when I come to the site.
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I really do not understand how you would manage to read my posts so poorly. Maybe you need to spend more time cooling off before you start writing, or maybe something’s going on in your life, I don’t know. I do not know you.
Either way, several of the things you mention here were once again huge misinterpretations of me or outright ignore things I’ve said, and it’s clearly not worth it trying to talk to you anymore. I can no longer trust in your interactions being in good faith. Goodbye.
Would you take a YouTuber’s word on it?
