Treasury Targets IT Worker Network Generating Revenue for DPRK Weapons Programs

WASHINGTON — Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is sanctioning two individuals and four entities for generating illicit revenue for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) government.The DPRK dispatches thousands of highly skilled information technology (IT) workers around the world with orders to generate revenue for the DPRK government to circumvent U.S. and United Nations (UN) sanctions. These IT workers obfuscate their identities and locations to fraudulently obtain freelance employment contracts from clients around the world for IT projects, such as software and mobile application development. The DPRK government withholds up to 90 percent of the wages earned by these overseas workers, thereby generating annual revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars for the Kim regime’s weapons programs to include weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missile programs.