In Brief

For the last few years, North Koreans have gotten remote jobs at hundreds Western companies pretending to be from somewhere else, using fake resumes, and sometimes with the help of American collaborators.

It’s been a major problem for years, as North Korea remains highly sanctioned by the U.S. and European governments because of the regime’s banned nuclear weapons program, meaning companies are not allowed to hire North Koreans.

Over time, someone realized that there could be a way to expose possible North Koreans during the interview process: Ask the suspected impostor to insult the country’s dictator Kim Jong Un, given that insulting him is illegal in the country and can result in harsh punishments. While this is a well-known strategy, we rarely see real life examples of it working in real time.

That’s exactly what happened in this video, which went viral on X. The clip shows a job interview during a video call, where the person hiring asks the job applicant to say “Kim Jong Un is a fat ugly pig.”

The request appears to stump the job applicant, who gets visibly uncomfortable, pretends to have not understood the question, and then simply exits the interview. 

It’s important to note that this trick doesn’t always work. Some North Korean fake IT workers, particularly those who live in China or Russia, are not always under as strict supervision as the hackers within North Korea’s borders, and as such these tactics are not always effective strategies on their own.