Eleven nations issue joint warning on North Korean deepfake job-interview fraud

The governments of eleven countries — the United States, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands — issued a coordinated advisory warning employers that North Korean IT operatives were using real-time deepfake video to defeat identity checks during live job interviews, an escalation from the resume-photo and still-image fraud the same scheme had previously relied on. According to the advisory, as reported by Dark Reading, operatives run a deepfake model live during a video call that maps a stolen or synthetic face onto their own feed in real time, routed through a virtual camera driver that video-conferencing software treats as an ordinary webcam.

The underlying scheme — North Korean nationals obtaining remote IT jobs at Western companies under false identities — has run for several years and is estimated to involve around 100,000 workers across roughly 40 countries, generating up to $500 million a year for the regime, some of which US authorities say has funded weapons programmes. The advisory recommended employers require in-person identity verification where feasible, deploy liveness detection to catch real-time deepfakes, and monitor hired staff’s accounts for behaviour such as unexplained location changes or credential sharing.

The joint statement, involving four European governments for the first time, reflected a scheme that had moved beyond the US technology sector it was first identified in and a fraud technique that had kept pace with each new round of employer screening.