He cites an example, but obliquely: “Let’s say you’re making a cartoon, and you are outsourcing the work. So you go to Romania, because you know it’s very cheap.” But the Romanian company knows of an even cheaper option. Its representative flies to Pyongyang and makes a deal for the same work at half the cost—and then gets 50% of the fee without employing anyone. “This has happened,” he says. He will not name movies. Nor popular video games. North Korean labor is also behind websites and crypto, he says. The shadow hands of globally sanctioned socialist labor are all around us."
I am particularly interested in the double outsource example he mentioned involving Romania. We know it's a shady country however, I think this happens more often and in more parts of the world. So it is entirely possible that companies that outsourced work from the US have paid for labor in North Korea without knowing about it or knowing about it and wanting to take advantage of a better project quote. Sounds like a good investigative story for a tech journalist to pick up.
This could also be a security and privacy risk. Think of proxies of funneling data from consumers. Oh, how I hope for an app store where a tab would be present to see everyone who was involved which created the app and its web services and the github history of it. Wasn't the blockchain supposed to be the end all fix of transparency across the supply chain?