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How a strange job interview turned into a journalistic investigation

May 6, 2025

Workbook

Last year I met a young CEO who was suspicious that some folks interviewing for coding jobs at his company were scammers. We chatted about the situation, and it was interesting—but I fully expected it to be some common-or-garden fraud, or the kind of “overwork” scam that has gotten popular since the pandemic.

On closer inspection, though, the reality was much stranger than I ever imagined.

It turned out they weren’t ordinary fraudsters, but in fact gangs of cybercriminals working for the North Korean government who steal people’s identities and score high-paying remote IT jobs in the West and then send the money they earn (and data they steal) back to Pyongyang.

Seriously.

Security industry insiders knew about this, but the story hadn’t really reached the general public. And, at the same time, the problem is increasing. These fraudsters rely on tech, and they’re getting upgraded all the time: AI to cheat on coding tests; LLMs to fake the answers to interview questions; deepfake tech to get past ID verification; VPNs to dial in to work from overseas. But they also use old-school techniques, too, with accomplices who run their ground game for them—connecting their computers, filling in forms, sometimes even doing stuff like taking drug tests.

I figured this was a story that was so interesting I’d want to read more about it. Then I realized that I had the chance to actually write the story myself. So I embarked on a full investigation, and dug deeper. I talked to victims, experts, defectors. I even sat in on job interviews with North Koreans who were posing as Americans, using stolen identities and pretending they were in Ohio or Florida rather than China or Russia.

It touches on a topic that I’m fascinated by, which is the history of fakery—from the ancient world to the digital age.

The result was just published in Wired. Thanks to the team there, especially editors Sandra Upson and Rachel Morris—it was fun (and hard) to be out reporting again, and odd to be on the writer’s side of the desk rather than the editor’s. And lots of appreciation to everyone who was part of the story along the way.

Why I love rain

November 26, 2024

by Bobbie Johnson

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Musings

If you grow up in England, you know about rain. You know about heavy rain, light rain, drizzle, mizzle, and mist. You know about the kind of rain that slaps you in the face, the kind of rain that comes at you sideways, and the kind of rain that is invisible and still makes you wet. You know about the rain that makes you hot, the rain that makes you cold. You know about the sinister rain that comes before a thunderstorm, and the crackling kind that comes during one. You know rain because it is there, almost every day.

There are plenty of types of rain you’re not familiar with, of course. There is no monsoon and no typhoon. You don’t often get those driving, painful rods that come down for days. There is none of the swampy humid wet, not really, and there’s no place to find that steamy tropical drip that feels like being in a sauna.

But if you grow up in England, rain is just the thing.

They make jokes about it of course, but it’s one of those things that is worth joking about; the kind of thing that makes uncles lean over and say to you quietly: “It’s funny because it’s true.”

These days, living in San Francisco, rain doesn’t come very often. Yes, people always laugh about the city’s indecisive weather, its umpteen microclimates and the thick, sarcastic fog. And, yes, those things are real, but they are also a sleight of hand. San Francisco often gets wet, but it doesn’t rain much.

Sometimes “not much” means “not at all.” A few years ago we went without it for a long time. There were entire years of drought punctuated by incredible, angry rainfall that had no proper place to go and simply broke the dams and ran away back to the ocean. Drought is not so frequent right now, but the dry has retrained me. It’s made me forget—or at least lose any affection for—the endless days of foreboding skies, those weeks when you live your life under a heavy blanket.

These days I love a good heavy downpour, but I have grown distasteful of the little rains, that everyday kind. During the rainy season I’ll frown at the prospect of a chance of rainfall; once a year I’ll wonder if it’s time to buy Wellington boots. Where I used to go out without a coat, today I’ll throw on a waterproof coat at the merest sign of damp in the air.

It rained this weekend, real rain: an inch and a half on Friday alone.

We sat inside, enjoying the feeling of being locked in by the conditions. I thought about the smell of the wet leaves, of walking to school and pulling up my hood, of getting off the Tube feeling sweaty and cold at the same time. I remembered my grandfather in his old estate carving his way through huge roadside lakes to create arcs of water that cascaded onto the grass.

I stood in the garden tying back a branch of wisteria that had blown loose in the wind, my fingers frigid.

A flower in the garden of succulents outside the front of our house was coaxed out into the world, red and proud.

My shoes were muddy, and I felt like a kid again.

You had to be there

November 19, 2024

by Bobbie Johnson

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Media / Musings

The news recently came through that the Guardian was unhooking itself from the drip drip drip of the Twitterverse. It was coming for a long time, they said, a decision that “the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives.” It made headlines, unsurprisingly—and seems to be a vanguard in a fresh exodus away from Twitter after the dispiriting election results in early November.

The news meant landed a little different for me, though: the start of a crashing wave of recollections—the kind of sudden, sharp memory zoom that leaves you a little disoriented.

Why was I thrown into this madeleine? Because I set up the Guardian’s first Twitter feeds approximately one billion years, two continents and many grey hairs ago. And I never thought shutting them down would be a news story in its own right.

They were simple things back in 2007, direct, unadorned and largely unsupported: a conveyer belt of headlines piped straight from the news feeds, built from unvarnished headlines and sometimes little comments. It took me just a few hours to set up the accounts and get them running, with some janky little logos and a very basic structure. There was @guardiannews, @guardiantech and a bunch more I think, and they gained followers rapidly: hundreds, thousands, millions in the end (although I’d handed over the keys long before.)

Like many things at the Guardian back then, the Technology desk was often the first place to try out new ideas. We ran with a nod from management, but felt like we were rogue operators. I was, perhaps, a sniffer dog looking for new platforms and ideas. Or—and this is more likely it seems now, with the benefit of perspective—a canary.

But it was fun.

The internet really was a wilder place then, less conforming, less sterile, more open and less abrasive. It felt beautifully unfinished. We didn’t know what was going to happen, and that was part of the attraction.

I’m currently reading Jeff Jarvis’s book The Web We Weave, which has some great examples of where we went wrong online, alongside a tub-thumping of what we can still get right. Its mixture of sadness and hope reminded me of an essay I helped edit back in 2015 maybe one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever worked on: The Web We Have To Save.

Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger better known by the nickname Hoder, had been in jail in Tehran for six years for things he’d written online. We’d met once I think before his arrest, and after he was released a friend put us back in touch. He had a raw piece of writing he’d carved out of his head when he got out and saw how screwed up the internet—this place that he loved so much, that he’d been incarcerated for—was.

The piece took a lot of work from both of us to bring around, but it stands up a decade later. (It’s ironic that the piece is behind a paywall now, perhaps, but here’s a readable version.)

"The Stream means you don’t need to open so many websites any more. You don’t need numerous tabs. You don’t even need a web browser. You open Twitter or Facebook on your smartphone and dive deep in. The mountain has come to you. Algorithms have picked everything for you. According to what you or your friends have read or seen before, they predict what you might like to see. It feels great not to waste time in finding interesting things on so many websites."

He was not wrong.

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I still think about that story a lot, about what Hossein saw—what he knew—before the stream and after.

It’s all changed now, of course, changed even more than it had back then. Twitter long ago lost its shine for me, my posting slowed as the tone shifted; I stopped completely a few years ago when it was clear that things had taken a dramatic nosedive. And, as I said almost exactly year ago, I don’t intend to replace what I found on Twitter with something else.

Threads just seems like swapping one soul-sucking overlord for another. I remain skeptical of Bluesky for similar reasons, a Twitter alternative set up by people who were looking for a do-over because they screwed Twitter up in the first place (even if I understand that Jack Dorsey has perhaps nothing to do with it now.) Mastodon just feels like an ill-fitting pair of trousers, and LinkedIn is well, LinkedIn.

The Stream has me in its grasp, just like everybody else, but at least I don’t need to feed it any more. All I know is that we started a thing in 2007, and it lasted 17 years before somebody yanked its plug out of the wall. That’s pretty good going for a rainy afternoon’s work, I think.

Forensic storytelling

September 15, 2024

by Bobbie Johnson

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Musings

Have you ever read an autopsy report? It’s brutal.

You peel a person apart, pick them over for information. You tour through their body, their organs, their selves like it’s the index to a book. In just a couple of pages of banal medical description, you are turned from an ordinary citizen into the holder of a dark secret.

The autopsy makes you a witness to somebody’s most intimate moments. You know them in a way that few other people understand, yet at the same time you don’t know them at all.

The descriptions are so minute, so detailed. The hair: how long is it and what color? The torso: is it fat or thin; does it have remarkable tattoos or scars or markings? The private parts: are they typical or somehow unusual?

Inside, there are reconstructions of the moment of death, and clues about how they died. An injury. Perhaps bruising or marking. Red eyes or broken teeth, a doctor divining the truth from the way the blood behaves.

There are other stories in the description, too: signs of somebody’s behavior, their past indiscretions, history evidenced through injuries and bones and the footprint of medical intervention or substance use.

Yet sometimes the things that we use to define us are entirely missing, uninteresting. Hair color might be noted, but the eyes? Their color is rarely important.

It’s even worse, somehow, when there’s a crime involved. A person dies once, usually suddenly and often unexpectedly, ripped out of existence by somebody else’s hand. Then somehow they are killed all over again by a doctor pillaging what’s left of them in the search for evidence.

I read an medical examiner’s report recently that broke me a little. A man, just a few years younger than I am, killed unexpectedly. There were twelve pages of information from the medical examiner, details of the autopsy and several paragraphs noting his injuries. The examination toured his body with the usual lack of emotion.

Parts of his body were deemed “unremarkable.” His hands, fingers, unremarkable. His feet, toes, toenails, unremarkable.

I thought about his toes in the ocean, wiggling as the cold water rushed over them. I thought about his hands touching a loved one, encouraging a child, consoling a friend. What’s unremarkable about that?

The mundane documents of science and bureaucracy have a way of flattening the most powerful things, reducing their dimensions. Being detached is their power, and their failure. If you look at research papers describing the most vile experiments, they seem barely different from the reports of an everyday scientist: Tuskegee explained in banal detail, thousands of men’s health and lives turned into data points. Or if you read court proceedings where officials are describing heinous acts committed against the most vulnerable, the forensic detail makes it seem almost commonplace, somehow inevitable.

I finished that autopsy report and sat for a few minutes, silent. What must life be like for the doctors and coroners and medical examiners? What does it do to a person to be so detached? How do we balance the important stories we can see from the meaningful ones we cannot?

“What is fair… and who decides?”

July 29, 2024

by Bobbie Johnson

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Media / Recommendations

Highly recommend Rose Eveleth’s Tested, a six-part podcast about gender verification in sport—and detailing the various ways in which sporting bodies have exerted their desire to categorize and control human bodies.

It’s well told, extremely relevant, historically fascinating, and full of twists and turns. But maybe the most impressive thing is how Rose makes the headlines personal by actually talking to the athletes who are affected by gender rules that treat them like freaks. Women like Christine Mboma, who are subjected to various methods of outside control simply because they do not fit somebody’s pretty arbitrary definition of womanliness.

Great athletes are often physically unusual: think Michael Phelps’s double-jointed ankles and gigantic wingspan, which were undoubted genetic gifts that played a part in his Olympic success. Or think of basketball star Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is very tall—at At 6’11”, he’s 14 inches taller than the normal American adult male—but has insane ball carrying capacity because his 30cm hands are even bigger, nearly 50% larger than the norm. Meanwhile Leo Messi’s in-built balance and unbelievable kinesthetic sense have aided his footballing genius, and he even took human growth hormone as a child because of growth deficiency. And yet nobody suggests these people should be banned from their sport for their differences, or take drugs to shrink their hands or seize up their joints.

Yet, as Tested carefully explains, that’s what happens to people whose bodies deviate from perceived “femininity” and get treated as if they are doping. During these days, when gender differences are under attack (and the show isn’t even about trans athletes, but it tells us a lot about the way people in authority react to those who do not fit precisely in the binary box) and as the Olympic games, it feels more relevant than it ever was.

I’m two and a half episodes through, and I’m all in.

What I did on my summer holidays

July 16, 2024

by Bobbie Johnson

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Uncategorized

We just spent three weeks in the UK and Italy, and it was glorious. Family, mostly, plus a few friends, a little culture, a lot of food, and plenty of pizza and pubs.

On the quiet side we visited the Isle of Mull and the Suffolk countryside, and on the busy end we hit up Naples, Rome, Florence and London. We explored Pompeii and the Coliseum, we watched Shakespeare, lots and lots of football, and we even bumped into the Tour de France.

Some reflections.

Italian museums have amazing access to antiquities and yet were pretty uninspiring. We took a few guided tours of places of interest and enjoyed them all in various ways, but as spaces, the museums themselves felt entirely uninterested in giving audiences an understanding of anything.

We saw room after room of cases with barely any description or context, or confusing displays that gave no real information. In some cases it was impossible to find the things we were looking for. And nearly everywhere was obsessed with provenance, with telling us about the story of how this item came to be in this museum, which kings or princes had uncovered them, which museum director had overseen the acquisition. Meta history is OK, I suppose, but I want some actual history first.

I did get to see Galileo’s finger, though.

Context was also missing when we went to see a performance of The Taming of the Shrew at the Globe in London. It’s a funny venue with a peculiar audience, and a play that is increasingly hard to put on (each new approach seems to wrap the plot in an extra new layer in order to navigate around its ugliness.) The performances were solid to strong, but the staging more than a little strange. The performance was hard, though, I found the handful of abrupt twists and turns quite distressing. No spoilers, but it lurched forward in a couple of unexpected places.

It was only afterwards that Anna, a connoisseur of the stage, explained that it was a Brechtian performance: i know enough about Brecht that suddenly the aggressive tone and shock value made sense.

Now, I don’t need my art to bash me over the head or deliver its message simply, but I would never have put the pieces together without her help. Nowhere in the program or even the reviews did I get a hint of the epic approach.

(Then again, when the Kate character gave her closing monologue dressed as a rodent, I struggled with serious Roland Rat vibes—it was only after we left that I realized that she was literally dressed as a fucking shrew. So maybe my radar is just not working at the moment.)

Oh, and talking of failed reviews: one other noticing was that the tyranny of online ratings is now utterly complete. Every service, every hotel, every museum, every tour… they all asked us to review the experience online. Asking. Asking again. Pleading. Personally I try to avoid giving ratings myself except in exceptionally good or bad circumstances. That’s probably a good thing, because if I reviewed everything that I was asked to on this trip, it would be a full time job.

A new side project: Curious Reading Club

May 2, 2024

by Bobbie Johnson

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books / Work

A few weeks ago I announced a little hobby project that I’ve been working on: Curious Reading Club. I’d love it if you became a member.

The idea is pretty simple: I pick a terrific non-fiction book each month, send a copy to you, then we come together and talk with the author and each other. Membership costs $25 each month—that’s cheaper than the cost of buying the book itself—and you get a few little updates, author interviews, and other reading recommendations from me along the way.

Like I said, it’s a side project. I’m doing this because I thought it would be fun, and I hope that it can break even pretty fast and sustain itself. But if you want to know more about why I’m doing it, you can read more about why I’ve started the club here, or if you just want to get email updates, then you can sign up for the newsletter.

Our first monthly pick is A Map of Future Ruins by Lauren Markham, a really interesting book that was released a couple of months ago about borders, migration, who gets to belong, and how we treat people who don’t qualify. If you sign up by May 15, a copy will shoot straight over to you.

We’re getting close to our magic 25 subscriber number, so if you want to join in then sign up for a monthly membership here.

Sweat equity

April 29, 2024

by Bobbie Johnson

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Workbook

I love my Peloton bike. I know people rag on it, but about five years after I got mine I can say that it’s more than earned its keep. I love real bikes too, but the Peloton has a lot of advantages: it’s always there, weather-resistant, can be adjusted to any member of the family, and requires very little from me to get going. Daily rides absolutely kept me sane during the pandemic, and while I have had busy times and fallow periods, I’ve now done nearly 1,500 rides and still use it most days.

Everyone who uses Peloton has favorite instructors, and ones they avoid. I prefer the trainers who push you along quite hard—and particularly the ones who work hard themselves, the ones who sweat. I don’t want anybody who makes it look too easy, or like they’re not doing the hard yards with you. If I’m sprinting, they better be sprinting too. If I’m cranking up a steep incline, I want to see them going for it as well. So, inevitably, my favorites get sweaty with me. Alex Toussaint will be soaked through by the end of a ride; Hannah Frankson will tell you she’s gassed out and has legs like noodles. In between motivational speeches on this morning’s ride, Christine D’Ercole had puddles of sweat flying off her.

This desire to see the effort is something I value whether it’s in physical work, digital products or anything else. I want to know that somebody worked really hard to make the website that I’m using; I want them to have carefully worked the device that’s in my hands; to have pushed themselves to make the food I’m eating taste great, or to have dedicated themselves to the art that they’re making.

This isn’t just about me needing to feel like I’ve gotten maximum value out of it; it’s not about effort for its own sake. It’s about effort as a way of demonstrating intention and deliberate choices. Sweating the details is a very visible way of being able to tell that somebody gives a shit about what they’re doing. I know from my own work that when you are really familiar with a craft—when you’ve developed your taste and insight—you can see how much work has gone into making the thing.

At Matter, we tried to make the amount of work that went into a story transparent, showing you not just who wrote it but who edited it, who fact-checked it, who copyedited it, and so on. (We toyed with even more exposure: how much money did we spend on it? How many nights did we work on it? How many cups of coffee were consumed? How many phone calls? We decided this was too much, especially for a tiny startup that was learning a lot at every step.)

Experience means that when I’m reading stories, I can see the archeology of the decisions that were made. Why use a particular phrase or construction or approach? Why say this and not that? You can trace the lines through the work, and you can see when it’s sloppy. But even when you’re not an expert you can feel these things. Did the maker work hard to make this easy to use? Have they tried to take your needs into account? Does the thing incorporate all that attention and intention?

We sweat because we work hard to get it right. Because making great things isn’t easy, even if it the end result is simple. Because that care, that love… it matters.

A little work update

March 12, 2024

by Bobbie Johnson

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Uncategorized

After two years, I’ve wrapped up my time with the Steve Jobs Archive. I’m extremely proud of the crew and the work we’ve put out there… and it’s also time for something new.

Honestly I don’t know exactly what’s next, so I’m taking a little time off to think about where I want to put my energy. But here are some things I am looking for right now:

—Conversations around consulting projects, particularly if you’re looking for excellent editorial strategy and execution.
—Discussions about advisory or board roles where I can use my expertise to help you figure out interesting but thorny problems.

If that sounds interesting, let me know: bobbie at superhyper.net

The virtual and the physical

November 27, 2023

by Bobbie Johnson

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weeknotes

Hayes Valley is one of the neighborhoods that’s gentrified most since I first moved to San Francisco. What was a collapsed freeway encircled by shabby Victorians and empty lots is now a bougie strip of bars and glossy retail. Strapping young people fill the plaza. Dives have turned into destinations.

The main street, meanwhile, is stacked with retail outlets for stores you probably heard about first on the internet. Allbirds, Away, Warby Parker. You know the sort of thing. They’re all “tech” in the vaguest sense. Direct-to-consumer, web-based brands with aggressive internet advertising budgets. More than one got going on Kickstarter. Brooklinen (519 Hayes St) calls itself “the internet’s favorite bedsheets.”

Walking along Hayes Street is a little uncanny. It’s a series of podcast ads come to life.

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Lots of the people in this area work in and around AI, many drawn to San Francisco by the latest promise of a gold rush. There are hacker houses, meetups, startups of all shapes and sizes. Some goons have even tried to relabel the area “Cerebral Valley.” Thankfully it hasn’t caught on.

The spiritual home of this movement is several neighborhoods away, at the offices of OpenAI—although the city is small enough that it only takes a few minutes to get there. The corporate drama that unfolded there recently is not my thing, but for those looking to know more, two recommendations. First is the Atlantic’s reported deep dive, which shows how the split inside the company is both wild and deep; second is this extremely good primer from Max Read. He not only dissects the issues and personalities, but also shows why OpenAI has come to occupy such an oversized position in the press.

There’s a presumption that there’s a deep philosophy behind the company, and really most of these efforts at artificial intelligence. (Molly White takes a crack at why that might be a problem.) I don’t know if it’s true, but I do know that for all the talk of generations with big ambitions and deep convictions, the same divides seem to be coming up again and again.

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It brought to mind, in roundabout way, another of my mild obsessions. Fast fashion retailer Shein mixes combinatorial scale, automated listings, intent mining, cheap manufacturing and labor exploitation to produce a massive catalog of almost-instant products for anyone. It, not AI, feels like the closest thing to a cyberpunk dystopia that I’ve seen in a while.

Now, like those stores stacked shoulder to shoulder on Hayes St, Shein is going physical. Mia Sato, who has been doing an amazing job digging into the nooks and crannies of online culture at the Verge, went to the Shein store in New York—and found clothes, home goods, and… bizarro land.

Like Shein’s dirt-cheap clothing and accessories, much of the home goods for sale online feel similarly uncanny, like someone generated 10,000 product ideas and slapped a price on them. The bizarre, seemingly random pricing coupled with the truly perplexing product offering give it a Temu-like energy — where tube caps designed to look like a dog is shitting toothpaste ($2.60) are sold next to chicken drumstick-shaped smoking pipes ($4.30). The pricing is one of the company’s main draws for consumers.

It felt relevant, somehow: this idea of virtual spaces becoming physical locations. Shein is a digital marketplace, it’s now in the real world. OpenAI’s known for its GPT service, but behind the scenes it’s real people. These companies are staffed by real people, and real people do what they have always done, for the same reasons as ever. Money, survival, control—these are just as real today as they ever have been.

Because maybe that’s what it comes down to: the real world. For all the conversations about sustainability and rampant-capitalism-is-destroying-the-planet, Shein and others show that there are big differences between how a culture talks about itself and how it actually behaves. We talk about paying attention, but we all want to pay less. We talk about taking care, but we want it fast. We want change, but we like familiarity. And maybe that means we shouldn’t be surprised when the unreal distinction between the virtual world and the physical ones disappears—whether it’s in the makeup of neighborhoods, in the shops we visit, or in the human dramas we follow.

(Photo used under CC license from SF Planning)