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The United States Department of Justice yesterday sentenced two U.S. citizens, Kejia Wang and Zhenxing Wang, for facilitating a fraudulent scheme involving remote information technology workers that generated more than five million dollars in illicit revenue for the government of North Korea.
Kejia Wang, 42 years old and a resident of Edison, New Jersey, was sentenced to 108 months in prison, equivalent to nine years. Zhenxing Wang, 39 years old and a resident of New Brunswick, New Jersey, was sentenced to 92 months. Both will serve three years of supervised release and must forfeit a total of $600,000; at the time of the announcement, $400,000 had already been recovered.
The scheme operated from approximately 2021 to October 2024 and consisted of what authorities called laptop farms: the accused received equipment sent by employer companies at their residences and connected them to remote access devices that allowed North Korean workers located abroad to control corporate systems without raising suspicion.
To carry out the fraud, the conspirators used stolen identities of at least 80 U.S. citizens and obtained remote jobs at over 100 companies, including Fortune 500 companies and a defense contractor in California with access to data subject to international arms trafficking regulations.
Kejia Wang acted as the manager of the scheme on U.S. soil, overseeing at least five facilitators, and traveled twice in 2023 to Shenyang and Dandong, China, to coordinate with North Korean actors, including a former classmate whom he knew was originally from North Korea.
To channel the payments, both defendants created shell companies —Hopana Tech LLC, Tony WKJ LLC, and Independent Lab LLC— with no employees or real operations, which received millions of dollars from the victim companies before transferring them abroad. The six American facilitators of the scheme collectively received nearly 700,000 dollars for their services.
The victimized companies incurred additional damages of at least three million dollars in legal costs and remediation of computer networks, resources that fund the regime's weapons of mass destruction programs in North Korea.
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