Recent reporting by the Wall Street Journal estimates that North Korea has funded half of its nuclear program over the last few years through stealing upwards of $3 billion from cryptocurrency startups and investors.

Reports of North Korean crypto scamming date back many years, but a hack last week on the cryptocurrency firm Atomic Wallet (which was linked back to the regime) has brought a new wave of attention.

The attacks involve phishing through links in emails and hacking into startups and unregulated exchanges. However, the most shocking attacks involve undercover North Korean agents getting hired at tech companies and coding in backdoors that hackers can later go through to steal crypto.

Reports of people being trained to impersonate tech workers and siphon off funds for the regime have come up since at least 2019.

Some even speculate that the amount of success North Korea has had with crypto scams is one of the reasons why the U.S. government has recently pushed for more regulation of the cryptocurrency space.

It appears that crypto scamming accounts for a significant proportion of North Korea's revenues. In 2021, it exported $181 million worth of goods, but reportedly stole several times that amount in cryptocurrency.

The country is a totalitarian dictatorship under Kim Jong-Un that is largely unconnected to the rest of the world economy.

The news of North Korea's ongoing crypto scam program has inspired memes and commentary. To some, North Korea stealing crypto to build missiles served as one of the funniest and darkest examples of "Crypto Bros Taking Ls" in recent memory.