The North Korean networks operating via Beijing

The FBI has dismantled forty ‘laptop farms’ and seized nearly 200 IT devices in Texas, accusing a network of American intermediaries of helping the North Korean government secure remote jobs in the technology sector, which have helped to fund the regime’s nuclear and missile programmes. The operation, codenamed ‘Lonestar’, is one of the largest ever undertaken to block a source of income that is believed to have enabled North Korea to circumvent international sanctions and generate billions of dollars in cash in recent years, officials said. Between 2019 and 2025, seventy American companies are alleged to have transferred nearly 3 million dollars to Pyongyang. Fourteen individuals have been charged by the Department of Justice: two Americans, who have already been arrested, and ten North Koreans, all resident in China and currently on the run, accused of identity theft to obtain salaries from US companies that had employed them without their knowledge.

For some time now, US intelligence has accused the People’s Republic of China of harbouring and facilitating cyber-espionage operations and the illicit financing of the North Korean regime, providing them with logistical and economic support, and the fact that most of those accused are in China is said to be evidence of this. Yesterday, Beijing and Pyongyang inaugurated the New Yalu River Bridge, a four-lane structure stretching three kilometres from the Chinese city of Dandong to Sinuiju, the largest border crossing between the two countries. The two cities had already been linked for 83 years by the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge, which had become unsuitable for trade due to its obsolescence. The new bridge was completed in 2014, but until now Pyongyang had postponed the opening, partly out of fear of becoming even more economically dependent on China. From here, Chinese goods – and others – will enter more quickly and in greater quantities. Chinese Premier Li Qiang himself said that the new bridge would open “a new chapter” in relations between the two countries.