Technology
Confessions of a Laptop Farmer: How an American Helped North Korea’s Wild Remote Worker Scheme
Thousands of undercover agents feed Kim Jong Un’s rocket program with millions from the likes of Google and Amazon. In a Bloomberg Businessweek exclusive, one of the regime’s US pawns tells all.
Illustration: Hokyoung Kim for Bloomberg Businessweek
When Christina Marie Chapman first stumbled blindly into a web of international intrigue, in 2020, she’d been trying to turn her life around. She was living in the tiny town of Brook Park, Minnesota, occupying a run-down travel trailer on a rural property her mother owned. Over Chapman’s adult life she’d lived in Texas, England and Colorado—drifting between jobs at big-box stores, fast-food chains, casinos, mortgage brokers—“not anything that I ever dreamed of doing as a child,” she recalls.