Is it Florizona or Aridora? A woman in Arizona, a.k.a. West Florida minus the humidity, was arrested by federal agents for getting remote IT jobs for tech workers in North Korea and running a laptop farm that allowed them to log into companies’ computer systems, the BBC reports.
The woman, 49-year-old Christina Chapman is charged with stealing the identities of 60 Americans under which she was able to secure work for three North Korean workers from 300 companies, including a number of Fortune 500 companies, a television network and at least one defense contractor.
Chapman set up a laptop farm in her Arizona home, allowing the North Korean workers to appear to be working from a home address in the US using the companies’ proprietary hardware, while the workers were signing in from their locations in North Korea, something the indictment says was done with permission of the regime of Kim Jong-un. Since 2020, Chapman was able to collect nearly $7 million in compensation from the companies for a fake personnel placement company, taking a large cut for herself.