A Frightening Possibility: What If Those Helping Them Obtain Jobs Are Organized Groups—or Even Agents of State Power?
By Sung Ku HongHead Reporter, News And Post / Editor-in-Chief, The Korea Signal
The North Korean FAKER Act: North Korean Fraudulent Applicants Knowingly Enriching the Regime Act (H.R. 9963), introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on July 27 by Rep. Young Kim (R-California), is not simply a bill targeting North Korea.
The bill is designed to prevent North Korea from generating foreign currency by placing remote IT workers who use fraudulent identities in jobs at companies overseas. Its purpose, as stated in the bill, is to block “fraudulent applicants known to enrich the North Korean regime.” In practical terms, the legislation would allow the United States to expand its efforts to identify North Korean workers obtaining jobs fraudulently beyond U.S. territory and into foreign countries.
Given today’s industrial structure, in which supply-chain security is essential, actively identifying and blocking North Korean operatives who seek to infiltrate companies not only in the United States but also abroad should be regarded as an essential preventive measure.
The bill would authorize the Secretary of State to strengthen diplomatic coordination with U.S. allies and partner countries in order to:
- detect North Korea’s illicit remote IT-worker activities;
- attribute those activities to their perpetrators; and
- disrupt those activities.
The bill identifies four core U.S. policy objectives:
- Prevent North Korea from generating illicit revenue through identity theft and remote employment fraud.
- Prevent such revenue from being used to support ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation.
- Strengthen international norms and cooperative mechanisms through coordination with the international community.
- Use diplomatic tools against foreign individuals and entities that assist North Korea in carrying out such activities.
The legislation would give the Secretary of State new authorities, including the ability to coordinate sanctions with allies, exert diplomatic pressure on countries that tolerate North Korean activities, cooperate with private companies, respond to the misuse of artificial intelligence, strengthen reward programs, and publicly attribute North Korean activities.
