Call it Karma, but Fisker's latest blunder reads more like a spy novel than real life. It turns out that the automaker was one of dozens of U.S. compa

Fisker Accidentally Hired A North Korean Spy

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2024-10-24 22:30:02

Call it Karma, but Fisker's latest blunder reads more like a spy novel than real life. It turns out that the automaker was one of dozens of U.S. companies caught in a cyber espionage saga that involved inadvertently hiring a worker from North Korea into its technology team.

I know what you're asking yourself—what would a spy from North Korea want with Fisker? Surely the country wouldn't bother sniffing around for Fisker's secret sauce when it has the brand new sleek, four-door, range-topping Madusan EV that just debuted in Pyongyang earlier this year. Spoiler: it wasn't.

As uncovered by the Danish publication The Engineer, those bad actors from North Korea were targeting Fisker as part of an elaborate money laundering scheme. The kicker? The U.S. Department of Justice says that Fisker's hard-earned cash used to pay the rogue employee engaged in this ruse was used to fund the DPRK's ballistic missile program.

It all started in October 2022 when Fisker hired a remote IT employee named Kou Thao. The employee listed his home address as a house in Arizona. Nothing screamed subterfuge to Fisker. After all, it's not out of the ordinary for a global company to contract with or hire remote IT workers. Except there was an elaborate scam happening behind the scenes that nobody caught, because it wasn't Thao who lived there—it was a woman named Christina Chapman.