Ed Caesar charts the rise of North Korea's hacking army, amassing billions of dollars for the regime through various plainly unprosecutable criminal enterprises.
Around 8 a.m., having completed a total of thirty-eight withdrawals at several A.T.M.s in the area, he headed home, waddling because of his bulging pockets: 3.8 million yen is a lot of cash. … Shimomura deduced that he had been at the bottom of the food chain in the scam. The real money-makers were much higher up. What he did not know, until an interview with this magazine last year, was the identity of the villains at the top of the chain. Shortly after the A.T.M. thefts, according to Japanese police, the ringleader of the 7-Eleven operation crossed from China into North Korea. Shimomura had unwittingly been collecting money for the Korean People's Army, as part of a racket that became known as FASTCash.
