Could He Say Something Negative About Kim Jong Un? I Went Undercover to Find Out

Transcript

Can you say something negative about Kim Jong-un? >> Uh I think it's not >> For a Korean-American whose ancestors had to escape from Pyongyang, North Korea has long been a place of fascination for me. So, when Taylor Monahan, North Korea security expert, and Nick Bax of Seal Alliance and Um Labs asked me if I wanted to conduct a job interview with a North Korean crypto developer trying to get a job at Um Labs, [music] I jumped at the opportunity. The country's elite hackers have been stealing crypto for the dictatorship for years, for a total of what Tiramisu Labs estimates to be over $6 billion. [music] Even OG companies like ConsenSys have accidentally hired what the FBI and DOJ

call North Korean IT workers. In 2024, CoinDesk broke the news that this problem was rampant in the industry with well-known projects such as Cosmos Hub, Phantom, [music] Sushi, and Yearn Finance, among others, having unknowingly hired North [music] Korean state-sponsored hackers. >> I cannot say this enough, guys. Every single crypto company of like any significant size, dating back to at least 2020, has like had an IT worker. A lot of them have had like 10 IT workers. >> My number one goal when I accepted this quest was to ask the developer to say something nasty about the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un. This is widely known as a form of kryptonite to any North Korean, with most of these DPRK devs immediately ending their job

interviews upon being asked to do so. [music] To an American who can tweet at President Donald Trump that he can go himself, it seems almost laughable that North Koreans are unable to comply [music] with the simple request. But, this is how the dictatorship maintains its power, by brainwashing the population and controlling their minds and not letting any outside information in. And then, by enforcing those rules with draconian physical punishments for infractions. According to international NGO Liberty in North Korea, quote, "Even minor criticism of Kim Jong Un can result in entire families spending the rest of their lives in a political prison camp."

>> [music] [music] >> Even though I've known these things for over a decade, I was still curious to see it in action. This episode is brought to you by 1inch Aqua, the shared liquidity layer from 1inch. Back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance, and keep your tokens in your wallet until a swap fills. See how it works at 1inch.com/aqua.

Monahan and Backs presented a document that outlined [music] the IT worker's GitHub, various online accounts his email address had, gigs at numerous crypto projects like Game Swap, Metaplay, and Cook Protocol, past links between transactions from his crypto wallets at various employers to other [music] North Korean transactions, and a screenshot of an announcement from a team he had allegedly hacked that included his headshot. While these were all allegations, the dots connected, and as I would see when I got in the call, he was the same person in the photo from the hacking announcement that also connected to those email addresses, profiles, and crypto addresses. While those parts of his identity seemed accurate and verifiable, with the caveat that it's common [music] for North

Korean IT workers to maintain specific GitHub profiles as a team, two parts did not. First, the fact that he claimed to have a US address, Long Beach, California, and second, his English name, Justin Lim. Another alias he had was Jikun Liao, which is likely a fake or stolen name given that the surname is Chinese. [music] His claimed location was a thread that I could pull on to try to catch him in a lie. The fact that he had any online presence at all differentiated him from the vast majority of his fellow North Koreans who are not only not allowed on the internet but most of whom don't even have access to the country's intranet. [music] Even the North Korean state-issued

smartphones do not have free internet or intranet browsing. In the Hermit Kingdom, everyday North Koreans famously can face death, the gulag, or public shaming [music] if they consume any outside media. The other thing that set him apart was that some of his internet profiles indicated that he was most likely based in Vladivostok, Russia. Meanwhile, his countrymen and women are not only not allowed to live abroad, but they are also not allowed to travel within the country without a permit. But, the fact that he was privileged could have been deduced simply by the fact that he was employed as one of North Korea's [music] state hackers, an honor reserved for members of the elite.

One other fact that Bax [music] and Monahan dropped was that he had allegedly stolen about $2.7 million from Metaplay in 2022. [music] So, he actually had real crypto dev chops. I worried that he would be able to suss out that I was not an actual recruiter [music] but a journalist, and that he might even hack my systems or figure out who I was. Bax helped [music] me write questions and gave me a sense of the appropriate answers so I could react properly or make a contextually accurate follow-up questions. We also determined which video conferencing platform would help ensure my own safety [music] and security without a VPN and gave my recruiter persona [music] a name, Sophie Wang. I find it hilarious that he and I were two

ethnic Koreans pretending to be of Chinese descent with our fake last names. [music] I was excited and also scared to come face-to-face, or at least webcam to webcam, [music] with my hacker. Next set me up with an Upwork email, arranged the Zoom meeting for a Friday at 2:00 p.m. ET, which was weirdly [music] or not, considering that his job was a form of indentured servitude, Saturday 4:00 a.m. Vladivostok time. After a dress rehearsal with Dax, I [music] was ready.

Justin? >> Hello. >> Hi. Can you hear me? >> Yes, I can hear you. Can you hear me? >> Oh, okay. The moment arrived and I was finally face-to-face with a person who I had envisioned as a detached, cold-hearted liar, scammer, and thief, a North Korean IT worker. Instead, my first impression was of a quiet, baby-faced, introverted call center employee with a headset and a very buzzy mic, working under fluorescent lighting.

>> At 19, I moved to United States and also at the time the blockchain was one of the trending technology. >> He looked maybe 22. I started with some casual trick questions Dax and I had brainstormed to try to catch him in a lie about things like his supposed Long Beach location. But I had a hard time pressing him on the questions because they were basically chitchat [music] and I didn't want to go full bad cop from the start since that could blow my cover. For instance, I asked him how the weather was in Long Beach, about recent events in Los Angeles. I think like Disney, uh, what is it? Is it Disney World or Disneyland that's that's near there?

>> I mean, the Disney. >> Yeah, do you do you go there often? >> I don't I don't like it, but >> Uh. >> I don't go often. >> And then do you find >> stay at home to play computer games such as Dota 2. >> I >> asked him what he liked to do and he responded window shopping. While that seems like a weird response, it wasn't something I could call him out on either. He seemed more like an indifferent, even emotionless nerd. At one point, I even wondered if he was reading his responses. The one bit of lore that seemed perhaps personal was that he said he liked playing video games like Dota 2.

Then again, was that just a made-up line to make him seem like your typical developer? Regardless, the impression I got was that he was just trying to get by and even, dare I say, just do his job. Which was to get hired so he could send money to the North Korean dictatorship. Backs and Monahan seemed excited for me to ask what his favorite Disney movie was, telling me in advance that Frozen seemed to be the most popular Disney movie named by North Korean devs. >> Do you have any favorite Disney movies? >> Favorite Disney movies?

I can say it's Frozen. >> He told me he was from Singapore, which was funny because the way he said window shopping was a dead ringer for a Korean accent. But I wasn't going to go there just yet. I was only in first gear but still anticipating the climax of the interview. >> I mean, I like to some window shopping, window shopping and uh sometimes uh playing some games with friends.

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See how it works at 1inch.com/aqua. Remember that providing liquidity carries risk and fees aren't guaranteed. Then I went through the charade of pretending I was actually trying to hire him for a job at Unum Labs. My takeaway, he's probably quite a capable blockchain engineer. He seemed proud that he had been able to fix an issue where the indexing speed of [music] the graph was slower than the block processing speed on Velas network. He had forked Velas network so that it [music] could use the graph.

>> I mean the indexing speed of graph node graph node repository was [music] a bit slow than block mining speed of this uh Velas network. To resolve this issue, I studied [music] the graph node repository carefully and I removed some [music] unnecessary parts to speed up the indexing speed. And after resolving this uh problem, the indexing speed of the graph node repository was [music] improved and uh the indexing uh was fixed. [music] >> I was not only impressed that he seemed to know the answers to my questions, but

also that when I asked him about the Seaport protocol on OpenSea, he admitted he wasn't familiar with it, pulled up the developer documentation right then and there, and analyzed [music] it in real time so he could answer my questions. He seemed very intent on getting the job. One other question he admitted not knowing the answer to was about Uniswap V4. He said he was familiar with V2 and V3, and then offered again to check the documents for V4. He also seemed to come up with creative responses on the fly. Since Un Labs was building a marketplace for physical goods, I asked him what would improve the user experience for that.

>> Actually, the other problem is that it's a security-related problem. Usually, I bought Usually, I buy things with my bank account bank account credit card. And for example, two of us can like exploit some tokens and they can take it just to buy some goods. I think it's not ideal. To prevent such problems in your life, I think it's also kind of problem in implementing purchasing purchasing things with crypto.

>> I guess it's also possible that he was just very good at using AI to help craft his responses. But except for those few questions, he really seemed to know all of the answers off the top of his head. Then I got to the security portion of the interview. These were questions that Bax had come up with because DPRK workers seemed to be stealing money from crypto projects by learning the methods used to secure the funds of those projects. Lim responded that multi-sig wallet should be the contract owner and then started giving ideas for how to keep smart contracts safe, like preventing reentrancy attacks.

>> Yeah, I'm sure you're probably aware that crypto industry recently suffered a big hack when North Korea stole 1.5 billion dollars from Bybit. So, these are, you know, >> Although I didn't catch it on video since my video wasn't set up correctly, a faint smile crossed his face. His only smile throughout our conversation. Bax and I had saved all the questions that we knew would be problematic for him for the end. So we could get as much information as possible before he was likely to leave.

>> All right. Um so we're a remote company, um, but would you be able to travel travel to ETHDenver or to ETHCC for in-person meetings and conferences? >> Just that's typical for me. >> Then we got to my holy grail question, which I had phrased carefully.

As a descendant of people who believed that communism was a bad idea and [music] so escaped from what is now modern-day North Korea in order to reach democracy, and as an American journalist who thinks that freedom of speech is an incredibly important pillar of democracy, I was deliberate in choosing the word I would use to describe the North Korean government, dictatorship. In my own way, it was my attempt to open a door in his mind so that he might someday question the cruel, brutal, and inhuman system he had been born into. Now, it was time for the question I had been waiting to ask.

>> You know, as I mentioned earlier, the crypto industry has seen an influx of North Koreans working on behalf of the dictatorship to infiltrate the crypto industry. So, we have to do a basic check for that. Can you say something negative about Kim Jong-un? I'm sorry. Can you repeat that? I didn't hear you.

>> I emailed him to see if he could rejoin the Zoom pretending like his connection had dropped. Eventually, 9 minutes later, he wrote me, aka Sophie Wang, back. Hi Sophie, my internet is quite unstable today and I am not available for the video call right now. If you share your Discord or Telegram, we can chat there. Thanks. Backs Monahan and I hustled to figure out how I could whip up a fresh Telegram account for Sophie. Once I did, I reconnected with Lim, who had the username Zero Bit, who asked what the compensation was for Solidity devs at Umph Labs. After I answered, I asked him again to say something negative regarding Kim Jong-un.

He responded, "I don't know much." I explained that he didn't need knowledge. >> [music] >> He just needed to say something negative about Kim Jong-un. After a couple minutes of no response, he then wrote, "It's quite a special situation and never faced with other teams before." Which seems like it could have been an AI-generated response. Regardless, he was trying to get around the requirement. I didn't respond, and then he may have blocked or reported me because a short while later I realized the Sophie Wang account I had created no longer worked. Which is unfortunately why I have no screenshots of this conversation, but thankfully I had been texting Backs and Monahan about every little update.

I agreed to do this undercover job because of an almost morbid curiosity about whether he really wouldn't be able to say something bad about North Korea's dictator. But after I had satisfied that curiosity, I felt [music] a sense of sadness. It brings some tears to my eyes. And I also had so much gratitude for the foresight of my ancestors, [music] in particular my grandfather. Yeah, cuz it means my I won't say which parent, but one of my parents was not born in North Korea. It also made me so grateful for the right that we Americans have for the freedom of speech. [music] And it also reinforced for me that no crypto company should ever be hiring North Korean developers. All they have to do is ask this one question, and

these devs truly will not They will not say anything negative about North Korea's dictator. So, if the regime will not be able to steal crypto due [music] to these workers not being hired at these companies, then this basic [music] check will really help save the industry. It will help save the world a lot of trouble, and I hope that crypto companies everywhere use this question in hiring calls so that not another penny of crypto goes to funding DPRK's nuclear weapons. As for Justin Lim, or whoever you are, I hope someday you and all your fellow North Koreans are freed from the barbaric [music] tyranny of the Kim family dictatorship.