North Korea is said to have extended from the establishment of false employees in western technology companies to siphon money in its nuclear weapon program to publish false jobs in the cryptocurrency sector as part of an attempt to steal cryptographic assets.
“North Korean pirates saturate the cryptocurrency industry with credible consonance job offers as part of their campaign to steal digital money” ” Reuters Today reported. “The problem becomes so common that employment candidates now regularly exceed recruiters for signs that they could act on behalf of Pyongyang.”
The report describes a social engineering program that sees North Korean agents contact job seekers on social platforms, ask them to “visit a dark website to perform a skills test and save a video”, then disappear after using the malicious code hosted on this website to compromise the cryptographic portfolios of the applicant.
Larger economic trends make it a great listening time for the crooks to target job seekers. Cnn reported that “the publications for the roles of software development on the site have indeed dropped by 71% between February 2022 to August 2025”, for example, with the New York Times statement That computer graduates find it more difficult than ever to find positions of entry level, despite the said for years that well -paid development jobs were abundant.
Combine this with mass layoffs – there have been so many pink shifts distributed to technological companies this year that Techcrunch East interview A massive list of dismissals announced publicly – as well as Mandates back to the office And it is not surprising that people who work in cryptocurrency respond to questionable North Korean recruiters.
Nor is it as if North Korea projects a narrow net. Reuters reported that Sentine and Validin researchers “discovered newspaper files accidentally exposed by hackers who displayed email and IP addresses of more than 230 people – coders, influencers, accountants, consultants, executives, marketing specialists and more – targeted between January and March.” This is a lot of scam attempts.
These social engineering systems are only part of the wider efforts of North Korea to steal the cryptocurrency. TRM laboratories reported In February, the country’s agents stole a value of $ 1.5 billion from Ethereum to Bybit Crypto Exchange in what the company said “the greatest feat ever recorded”.
As for the defense against recruitment scams, the most important thing to remember is that if someone makes an offer that seems too good to be true, this is probably the case.
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