The U.S. Treasury Department on 27 August imposed sanctions on two individuals and two companies accused of helping North Korea place clandestine information-technology workers inside foreign businesses to raise money for the regime’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programmes. The designations, issued by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, target Korea Sinjin Trading Corp., Chinese front company Shenyang Geumpungri Network Technology Co., North Korean national Kim Ung-sun and Russian facilitator Vitaliy Sergeyevich Andreyev. Investigators say the network deploys North Korean IT specialists under false identities, then steals data or demands ransom and converts illicit proceeds into hard currency. According to Treasury, Andreyev worked with Kim to convert roughly US$600,000 in cryptocurrency to dollars since December 2024, while the Shenyang front operation generated more than US$1 million for Chinyong Information Technology Cooperation Company, an entity already under U.S. sanctions. The State Department applied parallel sanctions and, together with the foreign ministries of South Korea and Japan, issued a joint warning to global companies about the growing threat posed by North Korean remote IT workers. Washington said the action is part of a wider effort to cut off revenue streams that finance Pyongyang’s weapons development and urged firms to strengthen identity-verification and payment-screening controls.