Technology-savvy North Koreans are using stolen U.S. identities to scam American companies and earn hundreds of millions of dollars annually for their cash-strapped communist country, The Wall Street Journal reported.

An estimated several dozen "laptop farmers" — people who typically operate dozens of laptops meant to be used by legitimate remote workers living in the U.S. — are being exploited remotely by North Koreans to generate revenue for Kim Jong Un and his government, the Journal reported.

The scam has affected many Fortune 500 companies, with the problem fueled by a lack of information security talent in the U.S. and the rise of remote work since the pandemic, Politico recently reported.

North Koreans impersonating U.S. tech workers have taken jobs to illegally collect $17.1 million from more than 300 American companies, according to federal prosecutors.

"That's a material percentage of their economy," FBI section chief Gregory Austin said, the Journal reported.

"These DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] IT workers are absolutely able to hold down jobs that pay in the low six figures in U.S. companies, and sometimes, they can hold multiple of these jobs."

Trained in North Korea's technical education programs, some workers remain in their homeland while others move to places such as China or Russia before seeking IT employment with Western companies.

Sometimes the North Koreans hire U.S. proxies to obtain IDs or mailing addresses to receive packages or paychecks or to act as the employee for a job interview or when asked to turn on a camera.

The FBI, State Department and Treasury Department issued an advisory saying each worker can earn, on average, up to $300,000 annually.

Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike recently identified about 150 cases of North Korean workers on customer networks and has identified laptop farms in at least eight states, the Journal reported.

The North Koreans use stolen IDs to secure a remote job and then coordinate with an unsuspecting laptop farmer to gain access to a company's computer system. They then hack into the database and steal money.

Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis said North Korean hackers have stolen more than $6 billion in cryptocurrency.

The Journal reported that workers sometimes appear to steal data for espionage or to use as ransom.

The North Koreans even install programs designed to get around antivirus software and firewalls to access corporate networks.

One example was a program that allowed spying on Zoom meetings.

"The way they were employing remote control was something we'd never seen before," said Ryan Goldberg, an incident response manager at cybersecurity company Sygnia, the Journal reported. "They really thought outside of the box on this."

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