A U.S. federal court has sentenced a 29-year-old Ukrainian man to five years in prison for helping North Korean workers use stolen American identities to get jobs at U.S. companies.
Prosecutors charged Oleksandr Didenko, a resident of Kyiv, in 2024. They said he created a system that allowed overseas workers, including North Koreans, to obtain stolen identities of U.S. citizens. Using those fake identities, the workers were hired by dozens of American companies and earned salaries that were later sent back to North Korea. According to U.S. officials, the money was used to support the country’s nuclear weapons program, which is under heavy international sanctions.
The case is part of a broader crackdown on what authorities call North Korea’s “IT worker” schemes. Security experts describe these workers as a serious threat to Western businesses. By using false identities, they not only break U.S. sanctions but can also access sensitive company data. In some cases, companies have later been blackmailed with threats to release confidential information.
Didenko ran a website called Upworksell, which allowed people overseas to buy or rent stolen U.S. identities for employment purposes. The U.S. Department of Justice said he managed more than 870 stolen identities through the site.
In 2024, the FBI seized Upworksell and redirected its traffic to government-controlled servers. Polish authorities later arrested Didenko, and he was extradited to the United States, where he pleaded guilty.
Prosecutors also said Didenko paid individuals in California, Tennessee, and Virginia to host company-issued laptops in their homes. These setups, sometimes called “laptop farms,” involved racks of open computers that North Korean workers could access remotely. This made it appear as though the employees were physically working from inside the United States.
Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike reported last year that there has been a sharp increase in North Korean nationals posing as remote developers and software engineers. Because North Korea is largely cut off from the global financial system due to sanctions, the regime has turned to schemes like this to generate income.
Authorities have also warned that North Korean operatives sometimes pretend to be recruiters or venture capitalists. In some cases, they have targeted high-profile and wealthy individuals, trying to trick them into giving access to their computers or cryptocurrency accounts.
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The sentencing marks another step in ongoing efforts by U.S. officials to disrupt these operations and prevent sanctioned funds from flowing back to Pyongyang.
