US man charged for acting as front for North Korean developers in $970,000 IT scam

A US-based man is facing decades of jail time for allegedly working with China-based foreign nationals to fraudulently obtain remote IT jobs with American companies. The Department of Justice (DoJ) claims that the 40-year-old Maryland resident, Minh Phuong Ngoc Vong, secured remote IT jobs with at least 13 US companies between 2021 and 2024 in a scheme where he received over $970,000 in salary for software development tasks. The DoJ alleged that these tasks were actually performed by operatives in Shenyang, China, who are said to be North Korean. The China-based developers then used these company IT jobs to gain access to sensitive US government systems from overseas. Some of these jobs involved contracting out software services to agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)