> wouldn't they burn out eventually?

They also might not have a choice depending on how much their skills are worth to the gov't... if North Korean.

Burn out doesn't seem so bad when you compare it to your family and friends who barely have enough to eat.

I imagine "a job is a job, everyone's gotta work to eat and sleep" is a pretty universal experience, unless there are post-scarcity societies that have popped up somewhere I haven't heard of. The difference among our scoieties is the degree to which everyone else accepts that it's "just a job". And of course your ability to sleep at night.

>It's a good pay job (comparing to other NKs) and they get to do what they love, so they are pretty loyal.

I would imagine the state takes the vast majority of their pay.

Burn out, or are shot out of a cannon.

[flagged]

Friend's comment:

> Konichiwa, Brzęczyszczykiewicz-san.

When you are dealing with intelligence services and others who work through deceit that sort of thinking is not tinfoil.

You seriously never noticed John Krasinski is Asian? Hats off to you for not seeing race!

Poorly-presented staging for a scam is part of the process - it allows you to select for only the least credulous of marks. If they fall for something that obvious, then you know you can take for everything they’ve got. That’s the entire principle behind the Nigerian prince email scam.

Might work, but they'd have to learn to mask their NK accent.

[flagged]

If they spoke perfect English and grew up in the US, why would they be less knowledgeable about baseball than any other American who happened to have little interest in baseball?

This sounds like it can't have been true, or at least, can't have been common practice, because the false positive rate would be way too high for shooting a person.

> During the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, the Germans infiltrated Allied lines with fake officers who would give orders that messed up the Allied command structure. The fake officers were Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US.

This did not happen.

However, at the time, in the massive confusion of a wholly unexpected large-scale German attack, rumours and paranoia were rife, including that of German parachute landings behind the lines.

A result of this was the widespread belief, at the time, that Germans had infiltrated and were giving fake orders, etc, and so troops were indeed widely being suspected, and asked for example the capital of Illinois and so on (and being asked by privates, who did not know that the actual capital is Springfield rather than Chicago, to generals, who did know).

the joke I heard growing up is they'd ask suspected spies to sing the Star Spangled Banner, and shoot them if they knew the lyrics beyond the first verse!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Greif

We can laugh about this stuff here, but it seems to happen on the regular in the Catholic Church.

The Roman Catholic liturgy is so stringently regulated that it is in fact very difficult for any priest or layman to stay current after a decade or more has passed. Perhaps this is one of the genius moves of the vernacular liturgy: that the Latin liturgy hardly changed its words for 500 years, but English and other languages are being constantly retranslated and reinterpreted with new Missal editions.

Case in point: the neutering of the Church for 40 years. The Church was made an "it" in English, and only after a top-down correction was issued did she become feminine again. This did a lot of trauma to many Catholics on visceral levels.

More up to date changes include the addition of "Holy" to "...for our good and the good of all His [Holy] Church]." this one is guaranteed to catch out anyone who's not been to Mass in 10+ years, such as at a wedding, funeral, or Christmastime.

A very recent priest's change is "...who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, [One] God, forever and ever. Amen." the "One" is now omitted, as of last year or so, and in fact every church was compelled to scratch it out in their existing Missals until new editions could be printed.

It is these sort of very subtle yet urgent changes that can really trip someone up if they're not 100% current with liturgical directives. So if you ever suspect you got a fake priest marrying you, see if he says "One God" or not!

When the pre-cursor to MI5 would interrogate suspected German spies during the war, they would ask them to talk about squirrels, and they'd mangle the word so badly, no matter who well trained, that it was an easy tell.

Related: after the war, they were concerned that there were Nazi spies still in England they hadn't uncovered. When the files in Berlin were seized, they went through every single asset sent to England. Not only had they successfully identified every agent, and turned quite a few into double-agents, they also noted that very few agents going the other way had ever been detected.

In the movie “Stalag 17”, the Germans place a spy among the US prisoners. The spy is a German who grew up in the US and speaks English without accent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalag_17

I remember seeing something similar on Masters of the Air, where the Resistance would question downed airmen :

https://youtube.com/shorts/EJmmq0yc08U?si=dnFXr0IgJh18pmp-

I think some countries in the EU use local variants of that on interviews/exams to gain citizenship for resident foreigners. The UK, as far as I know, has a written exam but you'd better know what kinds of birds are kept at the Tower of London and stuff like that.

> Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US.

Curious if you have any links that go into this further. Were they Americans of German descent who rejoined family in Germany, or? I'm sure it's not monolithic but curious if there was a pattern.

Mark Felton has a good video on it: https://youtu.be/1dninvXjUzA?si=Qdm6D97qPb8Dmzbl

Otto Skorzeny was an interesting man.

Drei Gläser!

[dead]

>it supposedly works right now; they will be absolutely allowed to say so if the interviewer demands that.

Thats the good thing about being a theocratic dictator. Your rules don't have to be consistent, rational or even make sense. Oh if you slander the supreme leader while holding a goose feather that you burn at his monthly worship you are forgiven. Or whatever.

> they will be absolutely allowed to say so if the interviewer demands that.

If so, there might still be limits.

You could make the challenge an n-part, back-and-forth exchange, of increasingly worse insults of that personage.

Complete with escalating to enthusiastic shouting, slapping the table for emphasis, making crude illustrative gestures, etc.

Perhaps there's only so much that an authoritarian work center will tolerate.

For legitimate candidates, doing this at the start of an interview might be sending a confusing message about the corporate office environment. On the other hand, it would serve as an icebreaker, to help candidates feel comfortable sharing. And it will tell you more about the candidate's creativity than Leetcode regurgitation does. Well, until students start buying "Cracking the Techbro Interview: Trash-Talking Edition" books, spending months memorizing lists of insults to recite in interviews, and rehearsing their delivery, with enthusiastic full-arm gesticulating. Actually, that would still be better for the field than Leetcode interviews.

Not exactly.

You have two factors working against this. The first is that in a communist/totalitarian regime, you don't want to give informants any opportunities for leverage. The fear of it being (mis)used against you is enough to take it off the table as an option.

The second is that were the regime give permission to speak this way, it risks normalizing irreverence toward Kim Jong Un, beginning with a large swathe of employees working in espionage.

But you don't even need in-person interviews. Video interviews work fine of you have any semblance of actual competence as an interviewer, and an awareness to check for these kinds of things.

Video filters are still pretty obvious in real-time, and, like the one example given in the article, if the person says they are from Poland but can't speak Polish, that's a good sign, too.

The only reason they paid for them in the first place is because they couldn’t get candidates otherwise. Not a problem anymore.

and now they’re trying to reduce staff, hence RTO.

nothing confusing about the situation.

I suspect one of my hires may have been North Korean. He passed all the interviews and asked for less compensation than the others, so we hired him. He avoided calls but otherwise did excellent work for about a week — until our KYC and payroll provider flagged him as a fraud.

They actually study and are incredibly good programmers

They have a whole team of people behind them.

You're hired.

My son and I have done "Yo-Momma battles" with ChatGPT, and one that it gave me where I laughed out loud was:

- so fat that when she jumped into a swimming pool, NASA found water on Mars.

Quoting the Korean Comic, “When I take my shirt off I have a one pack”.

https://youtu.be/mC68d-Mj270

So basically Yo-Momma-So-Fat jokes transposed to Kim Jong-Un? Those would also capture a pretty deeply American cultural kind of humor (yo-momma jokes)

He's so fat that when he jumps he jumps the Earth tilts a bit more.

Kim jong un is so fat he jumped and got stuck.

Hired

Why? It is just a fact. The guy is absolutely overweight. Who cares? Lots of people are overweight. This is also a fact. Are we not supposed to acknowledge that?

found the NK spy.

I interviewed this loser too.

Massive alpha in this for devs who can shake someone's hand and make appropriate eye contact

We're considering this. Tho we want to do an interview with AI to see how they use modern tools, then the rest onsite to avoid many forms of "cheaters".

Or for some industries back channel checks in network

Only really works in industries that are “small world”

"deepfaking" video[0] and voice is relatively easy these days, and is definitely being employed by some of these candidates. Lower the "webcam" quality a little bit, and it can be difficult for many interviewers to notice something is off.

[0] https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam

Their position within the grasp of the first-world "stay in line or go to jail" mechanism is fake. They cannot be trusted, because they are essentially above (beyond) the law.

If you can check it easily, so can they. Also I have no idea what my front door color is.

"It's been repainted since the Google Street View car last photographed it."

An answer that's also suspicious, because it means they know what you're implying by asking, and they've prepared for it.

My front door is not the same color as the streetview picture, which is almost a decade out-of-date.

[edit]

Actually over a decade out of date (timestamp says March 2012, but somehow also copyright 2025).

Employers in the U.S. are expecting to see domestic IP addresses.

A laptop farm hosts the corporate laptop (domestically) that is sent to the remote worker. Hardware is provided to work the power remotely, along with all other functions.

https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/us-wom...

https://sashaingber.substack.com/p/the-23-year-old-who-infil...

https://cyberscoop.com/doj-indicts-five-in-north-korean-fake...

https://therecord.media/arizona-woman-pleads-guilty-north-ko...

You have a bunch of laptops running software that accesses services that are normally restricted (like access per IP or IPs from certain countries would set off alarm bells) the client paying for the laptop can run something that does the work or submits the work from the IP address space that is OK. I contracted for one company and saw an office that had one department with a closet full of laptops scanning Craigslist ads because they were getting blocked if they didn’t take this measure but don’t know the details but they figured out a workaround and automated it to scrape data daily from all Craigslists regions daily.

On one such call with a scammer I called him out and said he’s from North Korea. He got a bit mixed up and started rebuffing me. The call got cut off mid-sentence, as if someone else pulled the plug.

There are other tell tale signs that you can watch out for (at least for now)

In this case the person doing the mocking is the interviewer. I don't see why the interviewee doesn't just say, "I have no idea" and let the interview continue. Why would that be forbidden?

> I'd think it just takes a blessing from the dear leader to mock his rotundness in front of the evil capitalists, as long as it brings in the dough and the corporate secrets.

The Muslim fundamentalists to did 9/11 shaved their beards to look less suspicious.

Look at their LinkedIn profile. All the scammers had non-existent profiles in their resumes.

Call their phone number. All the scammers had non-working phone numbers in their resumes.

I wrote an article about this based on my experience: https://koliber.com/articles/how-to-avoid-hiring-a-north-kor...

"Please read me the imdb plot synopsis of the film The Interview."

Background checks won’t detect fraudulent documents used to initiate the check. In my experience you need to provide typical identity information (passport, insurance number, address, etc.). If the applicant has stolen a legitimate identity, they will simply continue to provide documents consistent with that identity.

In-person interviews are the most robust solution to the problem.

I think it's silly as well, but I also imagine that deflecting this way would also be extremely suspicious. The agent would probably just think that the jig is up and move on to the next target.

A legitimate answer could be "who?"

I played a game of Taboo (a party game) yesterday night. I asked the question "the surname of the leader of party ..." (the third largest one in my country). The guy I asked it to looked at me and answered "I have no idea." He's old enough to vote even if he didn't have to do it yet. Leaders of foreign countries? Maybe he doesn't know where to place North Korea on a map, even the general area.

OK, we could say that the lack of a general culture could be a hint not to hire that person so that could be a legitimate termination of the interview anyway.

> ”How fat is Dear Leader?”

6'4 - 210lbs

If they can say the line with a straight face they are either an incredible poker player or the wrong kind of American.

I wonder what the American version of this question would be

According to Perplexity, he is 308 pounds! Wow!

> I'd probably be crucified by HR for saying fat at work though.

The dear leader approves of your workplace!

Ask the suspicious candidates what they think of the murderous North Korean regime. Avoids body shaming.

Differently slim ;)

I assume any similar question that could lead someone to be critical of North Korea would do.

> I'd probably be crucified by HR for saying fat at work though.

Really? What kind of company would make a big deal out of that?

Woosh. It's always been allowed to call a fat person fat. File a complaint under the 1st amendment if you don't like someone asking the question. File a complaint under the 5th if are being forced to answer the question. File a complaint with Supreme Leader if this question is bothering you and these rights do not apply to you.

Or it can be auto-triggered. I remember a history of a Call of Duty game were a number of players were being annoying, cheating and making the game horrible to play. Someone wrote in the chat "Tiananmen Square massacre" and instantly more than half the players were disconnected.

Or maybe if you keep the convo about KJU being fat, you trigger an alarm that schedule a police visit to your house, in a state were they first act and then ask.

Wow, it even works on HN!

https://fortune.com/2025/04/10/north-korean-it-workers-spamm...

You can just generalise the question like these interviewers. I’d criticise Kim Jong Un just to see what was up with this interview question.

No. All it took is to call them out for being North Korean and they terminated the call.

North Korean spotted

Nice Try Kim Jong Un

Surely it's not stupidiif it works?