It helped North Korea infiltrate American technology companies.
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This is not a new Netflix series ripped from the headlines. This actually happened in a quiet neighborhood called Litchfield Park that is about a 20 minute drive from Phoenix.
Christina Chapman, 50, looked like your average middle-aged suburban woman. But inside your humble home? A secret cyber operations center built to help North Korean IT workers buy equipment and tools for its military by infiltrating hundreds of American companies.
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Christina Chapman, 50, of Litchfield Park, Arizona, organized a massive cyber operation that helped North Korean actors infiltrate American companies. (Department of Justice)
That image above was just a small part of your setup.
North Korean workers don’t browse LinkedIn or apply for jobs on Google, Amazon, and Meta. They can’t. The sanctions prevent them from working for American companies, at least legally. So what do they do?
They steal identities of real Americans, including names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and more. They then use them to pose as remote IT workers, infiltrating US companies undetected.
But when do companies send laptops and phones to their “new remote employees”? Those devices can’t exactly be shipped to Pyongyang.
Enter Christina
Over the course of three years, Christina turned her suburban home into a covert operations center for North Korea’s elite cybercriminals.
Received more than 100 laptops and smartphones sent by companies across the United States. These were not no-name startups. We’re talking major US banks, top-tier technology companies, and at least one US government contractor.
Everyone thought they were hiring remote workers based in the United States. They had no idea that they were actually bringing in North Korean agents.
Once the equipment arrived, Chapman connected the devices to VPN, remote desktop tools like AnyDesk and Chrome Remote Desktop, and even installed voice-changing software.
The goal? To make it look like the North Koreans were logging in from inside the United States. Chapman also shipped 49 laptops and other devices supplied by U.S. companies to overseas locations, including multiple shipments to a city in China on the border with North Korea.
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Fake Chapman employees “popped in” from the other side of the world every day, funneling American money and technology directly to the Kim regime. (Department of Justice)
follow the money
These fake employees “showed up” every day, sending code, answering emails, attending meetings, all from the other side of the world. In reality, they were diverting American technology and money directly to the Kim Jong Un regime.
When human resources teams requested a video verification, Chapman didn’t blink.
She herself jumped in front of the camera, sometimes in disguise, posing as the person on the resume. He ran the entire operation as a talent agency for cybercriminals, setting up fake job interviews, instructing agents on what to say, and even laundering their salaries through American banks.
Your opinion? At least $800,000, paid as “service fees.”
The total loot for North Korea? More than $17 million in stolen wages, according to the FBI, which called the scheme a threat to national security. Chapman called it “helping your friends.” Actually.
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North Korea netted more than $17 million in stolen wages, courtesy of Chapman’s scheme. (Edgar Su/Reuters)
Eventually, the scam began to unravel. Investigators noticed strange patterns, such as dozens and dozens of remote hires, all with the same Arizona address, or accessing company systems from countries the workers had supposedly never visited.
Chapman was arrested and sentenced in July 2025 to 102 months in federal prison.
And the wildest part? He did it all from his living room. Talk about working from home!
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