The United States Department of Justice, State and the Treasury issued a joint advisery warning against the influx of North Korean workers in various freelance tech jobs, especially in the crypto industry

The public advisory was released on Friday, highlighting the critical red flags and identifiers for private firms to avoid hiring North Korean workers. The U.S. agencies warned that these workers pose a range of risks including theft of intellectual property, data and funds that could be used to violate sanctions.

There has been a significant increase in the freelance job market due to the pandemic, and crypto being a decentralized sector, offers some of the most lucrative IT jobs in the current industry. This is the reason for concern for the U.S. agencies who are wary of North Korea’s interest in the crypto sector.

Overview of North Korean Worker Operations

The advisory noted that North Korean workers often use virtual private networks (VPNs) to purchase third-country IP addresses and stolen identities to hide their origin country. The advisory further read:

“These workers develop applications and software spanning a range of sectors, including, but not limited to, business, cryptocurrency, health and fitness, social networking, sports, entertainment and lifestyle.”

To identify and weed out such workers from the U.S.-based companies, the advisery listed various red flags to be wary of, including inconsistencies in name spelling, nationality, claimed work location, contact information, educational history, work history and other details across a developer’s freelance platform profiles.

Request for payments in cryptocurrency and frequent transfer of money to People’s Republic of China-based bank accounts were other critical red flags listed in the advisory.

***Related: ***North Korea-obsessed Ethereum dev gets 5 years for breaking sanctions

North Korea has been infamous for stealing money through various ransomware attacks and hacks and is home to one of the most notable hacking groups called Lazarus. The recent Axie Inifity’s Ronin Bridge hack that resulted in a loss of over $600 million worth of crypto was also tied to the same hacking group.

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Despite being publicly endorsed by the respective mayors of both cities, MiamiCoin (MIA) and NewYorkCityCoin (NYC) have plunged 90% and 80% since their all-time highs.

According to data from CoinGecko, the price of MIA has dropped 92% since its ATH of $0.055 on Sept. 20 to sit at $0.004 at the time of writing. While NYC’s value has fallen by 80% since its March 3 high of $0.006 to trade at $0.0014.

With investors getting burned across many other crypto assets as of late, demand for MIA and NYC coins has almost completely dried up.

Trading volume for the duo over the past 24 hours has totaled a mere $70,190 and $45,663, respectively. In comparison, when MIA and NYC were at ATH levels, they generated $1.6 million and $260,000 worth of 24 volumes apiece.

Miami mayor Frances Suarez has spoken about the potential use cases of MIA on multiple occasions and most recently announced in February that the local government had disbursed $5.25 million from its reserve wallet to support a rental assistance program.

New York City mayor Eric Adams also welcomed NYC with open arms in November after he stated that “we’re glad to welcome you to the global home of Web3! We’re counting on tech and innovation to help drive our city forward.”

The assets were developed by the CityCoins project, a Stacks layer-on blockchain-based protocol aiming to provide crypto fundraising avenues for local governments such as Miami and New York City, its two and only partners so far.

A key incentive — despite potential regulatory gray areas — is that CityCoins’ smart contracts automatically allocate 30% of all mining rewards to a custodied reserve wallet for the partnered city, while miners receive the remaining 70%.

As of January this year, the value of Miami and New York City’s reserve wallets had hit around $24.7 million and $30.8 million, respectively, according to CityCoins community lead Andre Serrano, suggesting there had been relatively strong community demand to mine the asset at the time.

***Related: ***‘Philly is ready’ for CityCoins, says city council

However, while the governments have benefited from the partnerships, the user/investor side of things appears to share mining rewards, and a supposed 9% annual BTC yield from “stacking” (essentially staking) the assets on the Stacks blockchain is not enticing enough to drive strong demand.

Michael Bloomberg, an urban technology researcher at Cornell Tech, recently suggested to Quartz that the coins could even become useless to the cities if extra utility isn’t added capture investor appetite:

“People will stop mining the coin if they can’t make money off of it, and the only way they make money off of it is convincing greater fools to participate.”