From Indianapolis to Chattanooga with Pyongyang in our sights, I’ve spent the last week tracking a North Korean state actor attempting to infiltrate American tech companies for my documentary about the existential threat of deepfake synthetic personalities.
I partnered with a tech company recruiter who has become adept at ensnaring fraudulent candidates, leveraging both her considerable expertise as well as the latest deepfake detection software.
She scheduled over a dozen interviews, and not ONE of them was a legitimate applicant. All either had mismatched time zones to their IP addresses, were using suspect VPN and VOIP platforms, or worse, were employing the latest innovations to mask their faces and voices.
The most egregious incident involved a synthetic personality who claimed to be calling from Austin, Texas. An HR recruiter could not ethically voice such observations, but as I filmed, I noticed that his accent and strange diction didn’t quite align with the name and location that he claimed, and that his face was far more “uncanny” than the usual Zoom touch-up. When asked about his favorite sport, he said “tennis” and kind of laughed uneasily when the Texan obsession for football was mentioned.
Then the recruiter slyly asked whether it was the “Buccaneers that were based in Texas?”
After an uncomfortable silence, he replied that the Buccaneers “are down in Florida.”
Two days later, I shared this video and telemetry with a renowned “insider intelligence” investigator. I had barely set up my tripod when he declared that our applicant was a known face-swapped DPRK fraudster, intent on corporate espionage and earning money to fund the North Korean military.
As he reviewed the video, he stopped after the Buccaneers remark.
“Someone there is doing fact checking for them, or based on the speed, there’s an audio element. Usually they have ChatGPT running on the other side of the screen.”
As we three continued to investigate this particular candidate, we were able to:
Prove definitively that DPRK agent had used AI tools to swap his face (based on follow-up algorithmic frame-rate analysis of the video and audio).
Conclude that he was using an AI interview helper such as LockedInAI to respond to the recruiter’s questions in real-time.
I now need to connect with law enforcement to see if this case aligns with their own investigations into “laptop farms” run from homes on behalf of these foreign agents, eager to appear as if they’re working remotely within America.
It’s a growing affliction. Even Amazon has stopped more than 1,800 suspected operatives from joining the company since 2024, with a 27% increase in DPRK-affiliated applications quarter over quarter this year. And as I discovered in these early days of production of The Only Human in the Room, these foreign actors are getting more sophisticated in their attempts to infiltrate.