There's multipronged benefit for them: Access to company infrastructure to potentially cause harm or ransom in the future, access to technology / intelligence, but also simply foreign currency.

  Recently my friend was approached by a Telugu broker stating that he would pay 10k for a part time job ... My friend agreed to a tech stack and he was connected with one of his US clients and he started sharing his screen and gave him his entire sprint's work.

  There are thousands of such [Non-resident Indians] especially from Andhra, Telangana going to USA not learning anything about industry, these people have no coding knowledge, can't even explain their work properly to [3rd parties]. They [earn] 6 digit USD [and pay] these brokers some 40-50K Rupees [$6000] every month and outsourcing it to a jobless Indian. Brokers eat away most of the money and pay the end person around 10k [$100].

  The worst part, my friend said it would take around 40 hrs a month (2 hrs everyday) to complete this US client's sprint tasks (client works for a major [Multi-National Corp for] ~120k USD/year, while my friend gets 10k rupees/month [$100/mo].

"Arizona woman to serve 8 years for identity theft scheme benefiting North Korea": https://www.npr.org/2025/07/25/nx-s1-5479906/north-korea-ide...

* malicious: hostile actors want to gain footholds into companies - North Korea, etc

* benign: people in lower income countries want to do the job and can make good profit even when giving half the salary to you.

For the second option, some are scams and only want to pocket a month or two of salary without delivering before the company fires them. Others actually deliver and can keep the arrangement going long-term.

Be careful they might try and use your identity to then commit more fraud.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41641446

There are a few different angles to this. Other people have already mentioned the North Korean state-sponsored espionage, but honestly I think this is a small minority of this market.

The other two big ones are visa fraud and employment fraud. With the first one, you have a developer, possibly even skilled in a low-wage overseas company (say Thailand) that wants to make American wages. If he applies as who he actually is, he makes Thai wages, which can be as low as $10K/year. If he uses your identity to apply, he makes American wages, say $200K+/year. He can split that with you and make 10x what he would otherwise, while you get $100K/year for doing nothing (assuming he's honest enough to pay out, which is not a guarantee. There's no honor in thieves).

With the second, they use his interview skills and your identity to get the job, and then do nothing except get other jobs. It's remarkably hard to fire a U.S. employee without risks of lawsuits. If the employer does seem to catch on, he has a lawyer and a psychiatrist on the payroll too. The psychiatrist produces a doctor's note that you are disabled, the lawyer threatens to sue if you are fired. "You" go on disability, where you can stay for up to a year and they can't fire you. Collect the salary, move on after the year. In the meantime, "you" (or the organization using your identity) has done the same thing to hundreds of other corporations. I personally know 2 managers that have been victimized by this scam.

In all 3 cases, you're not the direct victim of the scam. They're using your identity as a shield to legitimize the scam. When it's discovered, it's you who suffer the reputational risk and/or criminal charges.