There's been an ongoing issue with North Korean state agents infiltrating SV companies, and this proposal helps them pass the interview process more easily.

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.

Outsourcing your own job is quite a fraud business.

  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 NRIs 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.

  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, that's all (client works for a major MNC and is paid around 120k USD/year, while my friend gets 10k rupees/month, almost 1 percent of what client makes). 

  What the hell is even going in this industry? This is beyond fucked up.

  Happy Labour's day

https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/comments/1chm6g4/nr... / https://archive.vn/DbK9x

You should update your CV accordingly: "Likely to pass several technical interviews (as assessed by the North Korean Reconnaissance General Bureau)."

Maybe they just want access to the specific companies? Like, you get hired by the company. You hand over username/password/vpn-info to them. Then they have a way inside the company and can try to steal information, install backdoors, whatever, with very low risk of getting caught.

I literally just got this email as well

Not that complicated? The scammer gets a salary for a job they would not be able to get legally.

"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...

hmm, my ex-manager would probably appreciate these guys over me because I bet they never point out when someone is an idiot.

There are generally 2 angles to it:

* 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.

You’ll pass the sniff test, they don’t.

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