Wave Digital Assets CEO David Siemer told Newsmax on Tuesday that cryptocurrency heists like the one involving North Korean agents recently accused of stealing nearly $1 million in crypto assets are "going to continue," so people need to remain vigilant.
Federal prosecutors announced indictments this week against four North Korean agents who the FBI says used fake identities to get remote IT jobs in the United States. The suspects then allegedly exploited their company access to loot almost $1 million in digital currency from an Atlanta-based blockchain startup.
"It's nothing new for our industry, and it's actually nothing new for a lot of industries now," Siemer said on "National Report." "Remote work is here to stay. We've seen this a lot of times, where people thought they were hiring Americans and they turned out they were running servers through a proxy in Utah or something, and you end up hiring North Koreans."
Speaking specifically about the Georgia operation, Siemer said that it was "a pretty small exploit," in terms of what's been lost to Pyongyang.
"So far, North Korea has taken, the estimate's around $2.5 billion so far, from other crypto venues," he said. "So, it's going to continue and, obviously, with the previous segment, with the rise of AI [artificial intelligence], you're just going to see a lot more of this. AI makes it very efficient to not just have a human team doing this, but you can have a thousand, a million bot teams doing this and doing it pretty intelligently. So, everyone needs to be more careful."
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia, the four North Korean nationals were charged in a five-count wire fraud and money-laundering indictment last week.
The objective, according to the FBI, was to generate revenue to fund the North Korean regime's illegal programs, including its weapons program.
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Nicole Weatherholtz ✉
Nicole Weatherholtz, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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