A 29-year-old Ukrainian nationwide has been sentenced to 5 years in jail within the U.S. for his position in facilitating North Korea’s fraudulent data know-how (IT) employee scheme.
In November 2025, Oleksandr “Alexander” Didenko pleaded responsible to wire fraud conspiracy and aggravated id theft for stealing the identities of U.S. residents and promoting them to IT employees to assist them land jobs at 40 U.S. firms and draw common salaries, which had been then funneled again to the regime to help its weapons applications. He was apprehended by Polish authorities in late 2024, and later extradited to the U.S.
Didenko has additionally been ordered to serve 12 months of supervised launch and to pay $46,547.28 in restitution. Final yr, Didenko additionally agreed to forfeit greater than $1.4 million, which incorporates about $181,438 in U.S. {dollars} and cryptocurrency seized from him and his co-conspirators.
The defendant is claimed to have run an internet site named Upworksell[.]com to assist abroad IT employees purchase or lease stolen or borrowed identities because the begin of 2021. The IT employees abused these identities to use for jobs on freelance work platforms based mostly in California and Pennsylvania. The location was seized by authorities on Might 16, 2024.
As well as, Didenko paid people within the U.S. to obtain and host laptops at their residences in Virginia, Tennessee and California. The thought was to present the impression that the employees had been situated within the nation, when, in actuality, they had been connecting remotely from nations like China, the place they had been dispatched to.
As a part of the felony scheme, Didenko managed as many as 871 proxy identities and facilitated the operation of at the very least three U.S.-based laptop computer farms. One of many computer systems was despatched to a laptop computer farm run by Christina Marie Chapman in Arizona. Chapman was arrested in Might 2024 and sentenced to 102 months in jail in July 2025 for collaborating within the scheme.
Moreover, he enabled his North Korean purchasers to entry the U.S. monetary system by way of Cash Service Transmitters as an alternative of getting to open an account at a financial institution throughout the U.S. These cash switch companies had been used to maneuver employment revenue to overseas financial institution accounts. Officers stated Didenko’s purchasers had been paid tons of of hundreds of {dollars} for his or her work.
“Defendant Didenko’s scheme funneled cash from People and U.S. companies, into the coffers of North Korea, a hostile regime,” stated U.S. Lawyer Jeanine Ferris Pirro. “Right this moment, North Korea is just not solely a menace to the homeland from afar, it’s an enemy inside.”
“By utilizing stolen and fraudulent identities, North Korean actors are infiltrating American firms, stealing data, licensing, and knowledge that’s dangerous to any enterprise. However greater than that, cash paid to those so-called staff goes on to munitions applications in North Korea.”
Regardless of continued regulation enforcement actions, the Hermit Kingdom’s conspiracy exhibits no indicators of stopping. If something, the operation has continued to evolve with new ways and methods to evade detection.
Based on a report from menace intelligence agency Safety Alliance (SEAL) final week, the IT employees have begun to use for distant positions utilizing actual LinkedIn accounts of people they’re impersonating in an effort to make their fraudulent functions look genuine.
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