Wyoming to dissolve three businesses after FBI reveals North Korea ties

Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray speaking to the Newcastle Chamber of Commerce. ©Image courtesy of Wyoming Secretary of State Instagram

(The Center Square) – The state of Wyoming is taking steps to dissolve three entities flagged by the FBI as instruments of North Korea.

Secretary of State Chuck Gray says Culture Box LLC, Next Nets LLC, and Blackish Tech LLC filed false and fraudulent information on documents kept at the Secretary of State’s Office.

“The communist, authoritarian Kim Jong Un regime has no place in Wyoming,” Secretary of State Chuck Gray said in a news release. “We have proposed several interim topics to the Joint Corporations, Elections, and Political Subdivisions committee of the Wyoming Legislature to take further administrative action against entities on the basis of their being owned or controlled by foreign adversaries.”

The FBI announced the actions of North Korea on May 17th, adding that it was part of “illicit revenue generation efforts” by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to finance its UN-prohibited weapons program through North Korea information technology (IT) workers. Authorities say North Korea dispatched thousands of workers to live primarily in China and Russia to find freelance work in the States. According to the Department of Justice, such IT workers have been known to make as much as $300,000 a year and may have been generating millions of dollars per year for the DPRK’s weapons program. At the time of the FBI announcement, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division called it a complex web of deception.

“The FBI and its partners are committed to leveraging everything at our disposal to disrupt North Korean IT Workers from subverting the rule of law in order to fund the weapons of mass destruction program,” added Assistant Director Bryan Vorndran of the FBI’s Cyber Division. “We will continue our work of maintaining order in the cyber space and preventing bad actors from taking advantage of it for their strategic geopolitical objectives.”

As of now, federal priorities include shuttering so-called laptop farms based in the U.S. These are places hosting laptops provided by victim businesses to people believed to be legitimate freelance IT workers. Meanwhile, federal authorities are also discussing efforts to enhance relations with private sector entities to educate personnel and the public on these and other threats.