An Arizona woman was sentenced to prison on Thursday for her role in a $17 million scam that helped North Koreans steal Americans' identities and use them to land remote IT jobs at hundreds of U.S. companies.
U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss ordered Christina Chapman to serve over eight years behind bars for what the Department of Justice described in a press release as "one of the largest North Korean IT worker fraud schemes" the agency had ever charged. The plot ran from 2020 to 2023.
North Korea is under sanctions from the United States — as well as the United Nations and several other countries — largely in response to the isolated authoritarian state's weapons programs.
The Departments of State and Treasury, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation accuse North Korea of deploying thousands of its IT workers internationally in order to skirt those sanctions and illegally contribute to the North Korean economy.
"The North Korean regime has generated millions of dollars for its nuclear weapons program by victimizing American citizens, businesses, and financial institutions," FBI Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky said in a statement.
"However, even an adversary as sophisticated as the North Korean government can't succeed without the assistance of willing U.S. citizens like Christina Chapman."
The scam involved 68 stolen U.S. identities, more than 300 American companies and two international businesses. The affected businesses included Fortune 500 companies: among others, an American car maker, an aerospace manufacturer and a technology company in Silicon Valley, though the indictment did not name specific businesses.
The Justice Department said North Korean workers using stolen identities had also attempted to be employed at two different government agencies — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Federal Protective Service — but were unsuccessful.
She pulled off the scam by operating a "laptop farm" at her home, the DOJ said. There, she would sign onto the U.S. companies' laptops in order to fake that the employees were actually working on American soil. She also shipped dozens of laptops and other tech abroad, including packages delivered to a Chinese city on the border of North Korea.
When authorities searched her home in 2023, they found and seized more than 90 company devices.
An attorney for Chapman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Authorities said that Chapman was recruited by an unknown conspirator in 2020 via her LinkedIn page, who asked that she come on to "be the U.S. face" of their company.
In sentencing documents, Chapman's attorneys said she initially did not understand the gravity and illegality of what she was doing. But when it became clear that she was involved in wrongdoing, they said, she continued with the scam in order to help pay for her terminally ill mother's treatment for renal cancer.
In a letter to the judge, Chapman apologized for her actions and said that she would spend her time in prison in therapy and counseling to address past traumas.
"I dealt with identity theft myself and it took me 17 years to recover from the damage it caused me," she wrote. "Knowing that I had a part in causing that kind of stress and suffering for others makes me feel deeply ashamed. My deepest and sincerest apologies to any person who was harmed by my actions."
The DOJ has probed a number of instances in which North Korea worked to defraud American companies to allegedly help fund their government. Last month, the department announced actions taken against such schemes, including an arrest, searches of 29 known or suspected "laptop farms" across 16 states, and the seizure of more than two dozen bank accounts "used to launder illicit funds."
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