North Korean tech workers, South Korean gangsters team up on illegal online gambling

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North Korean tech workers, South Korean gangsters team up on illegal online gambling

Published: 14 Feb. 2024, 18:48 Updated: 14 Feb. 2024, 19:17

A screen capture of a gambling site built by a North Korean IT company which raked in $5,000 per website it created. [NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE SERVICE]

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) said on Wednesday it uncovered a North Korean group running illicit cyber activities cooperating with several South Korean criminal organizations.

North Korea’s Kyonghung Information Technology Exchange Company, affiliated with the Workers’ Party’s bureau handling North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s slush funds, built gambling sites and sold them to clients, including ones in South Korea, the intelligence agency said.

The NIS said each worker at the company earned $500 a month, which they remitted to the North. The company sold the illegal gambling websites for $5,000 each and took another $3,000 to maintain them.

The North Korean workers of the company lived together in a clothing factory dormitory in Dandong, China, where they carried out illicit activities in a systemic manner.

The company’s employees found employment by faking their identification documents and stealing the identities of Chinese software developers.

The group’s activities violated UN Security Council Resolution No. 2397, passed in December 2017, which stipulated that all North Korean overseas workers be sent back to the North within 24 months of the resolution’s passage.

Some of its clients were South Korean criminal organizations, said the NIS.

The South Korean clients resold the gambling websites to third parties, reportedly raking in several trillion won in profits.

The South Korean clients also purchased domestic servers for the North Korean IT workers.

This provided a route through which the North Korean engineers could hack into some Korean companies, stealing information including the identification information of 1,110 South Koreans, said the NIS.

“This is the first time that concrete evidence has been disclosed to the public that North Korea is deeply involved in cyber gambling, which has recently become a serious social problem in South Korea,” the NIS said in a statement.

BY ESTHER CHUNG [chung.juhee@joongang.co.kr]