Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast
North Korea’s Billion Dollar Scam on the U.S. Exposed
21 May 2025
An inside look into cyber scams and the lazarus groupKarim's Links https://www.linkedin.com/in/karimhijazihttps://www.youtube.com/@TheIntrovertedIconoclast Follow me on all socials!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mattcoxinsidetruecrimeDo you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7Send me an email here: [email protected] you want a custom "con man" painting to shown up at your doorstep every month? Subscribe to my Patreon: https: //www.patreon.com/insidetruecrimeDo you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopartListen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox Check out my true crime books! Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCFBent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TMIt's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5GDevil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3KBailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WXIf you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69Cashapp: $coxcon69 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
The major players are looking at your house through Google Maps. They're looking at what neighborhood you're in. They see what route you take to your job based on your cell phone connectivity to towers because they can profile you for knowing exactly how much money you're worth probably paying based on whatever scam might be. I have a pretty unorthodox path. Started many years ago, mid-90s.
I was actually doing what is, I guess, a watered-down version of what I was doing. It's called competitive intelligence, otherwise known as corporate spy work or corporate espionage work, but I was doing it overseas. And I was doing it well before there were any real laws wrapped around that kind of thing.
So my job really was if a large entity, whether it was a company or government, needed information about a competitive environment, I would be the guy they would call with my team to go get that. So I lived a very similar life in a lot of ways to people that you probably interviewed quite a bit, but I did it as a very high-end consultative practice for those companies.
And I got I was very successful at it, decided to branch out and build a U.S. operation for it in the early 2000s. And funny story is I brought my consultancy to the U.S. I got my stationery created. I got my business cards done. I got the website going and I was ready to go. And then 9-11 happened. And I was like, damn it. This is how everyone did. It was like, wow, that's a shock.
This is going to be bad. And the economy took a hit. And basically, companies kind of clammed up on buying what they would consider more luxury-like capabilities and services, which I never considered a luxury. But unfortunately, they were too busy trying to do their day-to-day business rather than hire a spook like me to go figure out what was going on with their competitors. And so...
And over a sushi lunch one day, a friend of mine who was in the end of cybersecurity industry said, look, he goes, dude, who better in the world to call and ask how a guy like you would hack into them than you? So why don't you just offer counterintel capabilities? Right. I was like, that's actually not a bad idea.
So almost over the next two and a half, three weeks, I sort of pivoted my whole firm from being a competitive intelligence company to being a counterintelligence company. And so this is the early 2000s. Cyber or what was called InfoSec was just kind of burgeoning. It was still an early nascent thing.
If you ask someone about information security or whatever, people will probably talk about antiviruses at best, McAfee or Norton or whatever. Antec, I think, would probably be it. Firewalls, maybe that would be a word that people would know. But that was about it.
And so little by little, I gained a pretty interesting customer base of organizations and mainly organizations at the time that wanted to make sure their systems were up to snuff and able to be secured against threat actors. And that carried on for about 15 years.
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