The Everyday American Who Hustled for North Korea
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Who is Christina Chapman and what is her TikTok content about?
Bob, can you tell me about this influencer you've been watching on TikTok?
Yeah, her name is Christina Chapman.
Hi, lovelies. I just wanted to pop on for a second.
And she talks about food accountability.
I guess it's day three. Day three. Day two of accountable eating.
She talks about political causes.
that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
She talks about Japanese boy bands. And I'm wearing my shirt.
Epidemia. This is not official merch. These are shirts that I made myself.
And every now and then, she'll slip in something about maybe a renaissance fair. You know, just the kind of things that people want to watch TikTok videos about.
Our colleague Bob McMillan covers cybersecurity. And there's one video of Chapman's in particular that he says is a bit unusual. On its face, it's pretty innocuous. Chapman's showing her followers some breakfast that she picked up.
I just got... smoothie bowl. It's an acai smoothie bowl and it has bananas, strawberries, mangoes, and some coconut.
What's really interesting to me is that it's not shot in her kitchen. It's shot in her spare room, but the racks on the wall of the room, no pictures or anything, just these racks. And on the racks are laptop computers. I counted at least 10 laptop computers with different colored sticky notes on them. And the computers are whirring away in the background there as she talks about the smoothies she's eating.
What is laptop farming and how does it work?
So it doesn't really taste pina colada anymore. But it's good.
What was Christina Chapman doing with 10 laptops in her spare room? Well, according to a federal indictment... What she's doing is a scam.
And what the scam is called is laptop farming.
The U.S. government says that Christina Chapman was a laptop farmer, and her employer was North Korea.
She's facilitating a multi-million dollar fraud that's designed to bring money into the heavily sanctioned North Korean regime.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Annie Minoff. It's Tuesday, June 3rd. Coming up on the show, how an everyday American helped North Korea scam corporate America.
Hi, everybody, TikTok fam. I need some help, and I don't know really how to do this.
In January 2021, Christina Chapman took to TikTok to check in with her followers. Her financial situation was precarious.
I mean, she had worked as a waitress, as a massage therapist, and right around 2019, she decided to sort of reinvent herself in the era of the gig economy. She went to a tech boot camp and got some web development skills, but it wasn't paying out, right? Like, she was living in a small town north of Minneapolis, basically in a trailer.
I'm classified as homeless in Minnesota. I live in a travel trailer. I don't have running water. I don't have a working bathroom. And now I don't have heat.
But Chapman's situation was about to turn around. In fact, the answer to her financial troubles had arrived just a few months before she posted that video, in the form of a social media message.
The message comes via LinkedIn. And it says we're a foreign company looking for a U.S. representative. That's really all we know about the message.
What role did Christina Chapman play in the North Korean scam?
We do know that Chapman agreed to help out. And according to court documents, we know who that message came from. North Korean scammers. Chapman had stumbled into what's become a vast scam designed to bring hundreds of millions of dollars into North Korea. It took off during the pandemic, when many U.S. tech jobs moved online. And it works like this. North Koreans trained in IT apply for remote jobs in the U.S. Those workers get hired, start work, and get paid, all under false identities.
It's almost always a tech job, right? So it's quite often coding.
And do they do the job?
Yeah, they do, you know. Like, I've heard stories of these, some North Koreans, they just kind of, they get hired, they log into a couple of meetings, they never say anything, and then they're quickly fired, right? And then some apparently last for years.
According to the FBI, their paychecks likely get funneled to the North Korean regime, where the money may help fund things like the country's nuclear weapons program.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Who is Christina Chapman and what is her TikTok content about?
0:05–1:47
2
What is laptop farming and how does it work?
1:47–4:30
3
What role did Christina Chapman play in the North Korean scam?
4:30–5:35
4
How do North Korean scammers infiltrate U.S. companies?
5:35–8:44
5
What are the implications of the North Korean scam on U.S. cybersecurity?
8:44–12:39
6
What challenges do North Korean scammers face in remote jobs?
12:39–15:24