Amazon blocks North Korean IT applicants
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Why did Amazon block North Korean IT applicants?
Amazon tells North Koreans you have no career here in the UK. This is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service. I'm Gideon Long. Good morning. The tech giant Amazon says it's blocked more than 1,800 North Koreans from trying to join the company in the past two years. Amazon's chief security officer said North Koreans often try to get hired and then send wages back to fund their government's weapons programmes. The BBC's Surinjana Tiwari has the details from Singapore. Hi, Surinjana. Hi there. Tell us more, Sirinjana. Yeah, this has come from Amazon's chief security officer, Stephen Schmidt, who wrote it in a LinkedIn post. And he basically said that the U.S.
How are North Korean applicants trying to exploit remote job opportunities?
technology giant has seen an upsurge in the number of job applications from suspected North Korean agents. Now, they were trying to apply for remote jobs. working IT jobs using stolen or fake identities. And apparently their objective is typically straightforward, to get hired, to get paid and funnel wages back to fund the regime's weapons programmes. That's according to Stephen Schmidt. Now, he added that this is actually likely to be happening not just in Amazon, but at scale across the industry, especially in the United States. And the way that it works is they rely on something called laptop farms, which is basically working with people who are using computers based in the US, but are run remotely from outside of the country.
Right, and how common is this then? And are other tech companies worried, given what Amazon has been saying? Yeah, well, Mr Schmidt has sounded the alarm. He's shone a spotlight on Amazon's issue and said it is prevalent across the tech industry, probably. There have been a few cases that show that this is happening. In June, for example... The U.S. government said it had uncovered 29 laptop firms that were being operated illegally across the country by North Korean IT workers. And they also use stolen or forged identities of Americans to help these North Korean nationals get jobs in the U.S. And it also indicted some brokers who had helped those operatives secure jobs. In July, a woman from Arizona was sentenced to more than eight years in jail for running a similar laptop farm.
And the Department of Justice in the US said the scheme generated more than $17 million in illicit games for her and for Pyongyang. Surinjana Tiwari, thanks for joining us on Marketplace. Thank you. Let's do the numbers. Chairs in the Danish pharmaceutical firm Novo Nordisk have jumped more than 7% after the US Food and Drug Administration approved a pill version of its weight loss drug, Wegovi. Europe's largest budget airline, Ryanair, has been fined $300 million in Italy for abuse of a dominant market position. And Japanese carmaker Toyota has recalled over 55,000 cars in the US due to fears that a bolt inside the electricity inverter might not have been tightened properly. Now, people get obsessed by things all over the world, whether it be sports teams, pop stars or anime cartoons.
But the Japanese have a word for it, oshikatsu, to describe this fervent fan culture. Some economists say oshikatsu and the purchasing power that comes with it has helped pull Japanese retail sales out of a long slump. The BBC's Rick Kelsey is in Tokyo. We've come to the world's largest anime store in Toshima City here in Tokyo. Anime is a Japanese animation in the form of film and TV shows and this is a 10-story building covering an incredible 92,000 square feet. Those footsteps are fans heading up to the theatre and the event halls on the top floors. 16-year-olds Mao, Emery and Senu are on a mission to find their favourite character's merchandise. It's basically like people who love things, love a certain character, anime.
It's usually used as in like anime context or like idol context, but Oshikatsu is a way of us otakus to appeal our love to like our favourite characters, our favourite idols, our favourite like singers, stuff like that. Oshikatsu comes in the physical form. Badges, posters, buttons, mini character toys.
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