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For years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been unraveling what it asserts is a scam perpetrated by agents of North Korea, which used fake companies employing real IT workers to funnel money back to the regime’s military.

An American company played a key role in creating shell companies used as part of the scheme, a WIRED review of public records shows. Elected officials are now contemplating addressing loopholes in business-registration law that the scheme exposed.

In May, Wyoming secretary of state Chuck Gray revoked the business licenses of three companies linked to the North Korean scam: Culture Box LLC, Next Nets LLC, and Blackish Tech LLC. Gray said his office made the decision after receiving information from the FBI and conducting an investigation.

“The communist, authoritarian Kim Jong Un regime has no place in Wyoming,” Gray said in a May press release.

The companies posed as legitimate operations where businesses could hire contract workers to perform IT solutions, complete with fake websites featuring smiling photos of apparent employees. The companies all had one thing in common: Their incorporation documents were filed by a company called Registered Agents Inc., which says its global headquarters is in Sheridan, Wyoming.

Registered Agents, which provides incorporation services in every US state, takes the practice of business privacy to the extreme, and regularly uses fake personae to file formation documents with state agencies, a WIRED investigation previously found.

Culture Box LLC, one of the companies that Gray and the FBI linked to North Korea, listed “Riley Park” as the name of a Registered Agents employee on documents submitted to the Wyoming secretary of state. Park, according to several former employees of Registered Agents, is a fake persona that the company regularly used to file incorporation documents.

In a statement provided to WIRED, Registered Agents wrote, “The Wyoming Secretary of State dissolved the entities and we initiated the 30-day process to resign as their agent in mid-May. Ours and Wyoming’s processes to identify bad actors works. It strikes the best balance of individual privacy and business transparency supported by an entire ecosystem that cares about supporting entrepreneurs while rooting out the small percent of scammers.” The FBI’s St. Louis office, which led the investigation, did not respond to a request for comment.

The North Korean operation worked like this: Agents of the regime created fake companies purporting to be legitimate firms offering freelance IT services. Workers hired by North Koreans, or North Koreans themselves, would then perform legitimate contractor work, often using assumed identities.

In some instances, Americans would set up low-cost laptops with remote-access software, allowing North Korean workers to perform freelance IT work while appearing to use American IP addresses. The FBI referred to these Americans as “virtual assistants.”

The payments for the IT work were eventually funneled back to North Korea—where, the Department of Justice asserts, it was directed to the country’s Ministry of Defense and other agencies involved in WMD work. The scheme was so expansive that any company that hired freelance IT workers “more than likely” hired someone involved in the operation, according to FBI agent Jay Greenberg.

China has landed on the moon’s mysterious far side — again.

The robotic Chang’e 6 mission touched down inside Apollo Crater, within the giant South Pole-Aitken basin, at 6:23 a.m. Beijing Time on Sunday (June 2) , according to Chinese space officials. It was 6:23 p.m. EDT (2223 GMT) on June 1 at the time of the landing. The probe "successfully landed in the pre-selected area," China’s space agency said.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) now has two far-side landings under its belt — this one and Chang’e 4, which dropped a lander-rover combo onto the gray dirt in January 2019. No other country has done it once.

And Chang’e 6 will make further history for China, if all goes according to plan: The mission aims to scoop up samples and send them back to Earth, giving researchers their first-ever up-close looks at material from this part of the moon.

"The Chang’e-6 mission is the first human sampling and return mission from the far side of the moon," CNSA officials said in a translated statement. (To be clear: Chang’e 6 is a robotic, not crewed, mission.) "It involves many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty." 

Related: China’s Chang’e 6 mission has a big lunar mystery to solve

Sampling a new environment

Chang’e 6 launched on May 3 with a bold and unprecedented task: haul home samples from the moon’s far side, which always faces away from us. (The moon is tidally locked to Earth, completing one rotation on its axis in roughly the same amount of time it takes to orbit our planet. So observers here on Earth always see the same side of our natural satellite.)

Every lunar surface mission before Chang’e 4 targeted the near side, largely because that area is easier to explore. It’s harder to communicate with robots operating on the far side, for example; doing so generally requires special relay orbiters, which China launched ahead of both Chang’e 4 and Chang’e 6. China’s newest moon relay satellite, called Queqiao-2, aided the Chang’e 6 landing, CNSA officials said.

Chang’e 6 arrived in lunar orbit about four days after liftoff. It spent the next few weeks scrutinizing its planned landing site and gearing up for today’s big event, which went according to plan: Chang’e 6’s lander came down softly in Apollo Crater, leaving the mission’s orbiter, with its attached Earth-reentry module, circling the moon.

The lander will spend the next few days studying its surroundings and collecting about 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) of lunar dirt and rock. Some of these samples will be scooped from the surface and some will be dug from up to 6.5 feet (2 meters) underground, using Chang’e 6’s onboard drill.

This material will then be launched into lunar orbit by a rocket that rode down with the lander. The sample container will rendezvous with the Chang’e 6 orbiter, then make the long trek back to Earth, eventually touching down here under parachutes on June 25.

Chang’e 6 is also carrying a tiny moon rover and has a variety of scientific experiments onboard the lander.

Scientists will study the returned material in detail, seeking insights about the moon’s history and evolution and clues about why the lunar far side is so different than the near. The dark volcanic seas known as maria are common on the near side, for example, but are rare on the far side, for reasons that remain mysterious.

Researchers will doubtless compare the Chang’e 6 material to the samples collected on the moon’s near side by Chang’e 5, which came down to Earth in December 2020. (Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 are sister missions, with virtually identical architectures.)

Related: The moon: Everything you need to know

Big lunar dreams

The Chang’e moon program, which is named after the Chinese moon goddess, has launched increasingly complex and ambitious missions over the past 17 years.

Chang’e 1 and Chang’e 2 sent orbiters to the moon in 2007 and 2010, respectively. Chang’e 3 marked China’s first trip to the lunar surface, putting a lander-rover duo on the near side in late 2013. Chang’e 4 landed a similar pair on the far side in early 2019. Chang’e 5-T1 launched a test capsule around the moon and back to Earth in 2014, proving out the gear that could get lunar samples here safely, which Chang’e 5 did in late 2020.

And there are more missions to come. Chang’e 7 is scheduled to launch in 2026 to assess the resource potential of the moon’s south polar region, which is thought to harbor large stores of water ice. Chang’e 8, which will lift off two years later, will test ways to use those resources on-site — building a structure out of lunar dirt and rock, for example.

And all of this robotic work will lead to something even bigger, if all goes according to plan: crewed missions to the moon, which China aims to start launching by 2030. The nation wants to build an astronaut outpost near the south pole called the International Lunar Research Station later in the 2030s, with help from partners such as Russia, Belarus and Pakistan.

The United States has similar aims with its Artemis program, which is targeting late 2026 for its first crewed lunar landing. The U.S. is also building a moon-exploration coalition via a diplomatic framework called the Artemis Accords; more than 40 nations have signed on to date.

The United States Department of Justice on Wednesday announced charges against a 35-year-old Chinese national, YunHe Wang, accused of operating a massive botnet allegedly linked to billions of dollars in fraud, child exploitation, and bomb threats, among other crimes.

Wang, identified by numerous pseudonyms—Tom Long and Jack Wan, among others—was arrested on May 24 and is accused of distributing malware through various pop-up VPN services, such as “ProxyGate” and “MaskVPN,” and by embedding viruses in internet files distributed via peer-to-peer networks known as torrents.

The malware is said to have compromised computers located in nearly every country in the world, turning them into proxies through which criminals were able to hide their identities while committing countless crimes. According to prosecutors in the US, this included the theft of billions of dollars slated for Covid-19 pandemic relief; funds allegedly stolen by foreign actors posing as unemployed US citizens.

According to an indictment, the infected computers allegedly provided Wang’s customers with a persistent backdoor, allowing them to disguise themselves as any one of the victims of Wang’s malware. This illicit proxy service, known as “911 S5,” launched as early as 2014, the US government says.

“The 911 S5 Botnet infected computers in nearly 200 countries and facilitated a whole host of computer-enabled crimes, including financial frauds, identity theft, and child exploitation,” says FBI director Christopher Wray, who described the illicit service as “likely the world’s largest botnet ever.”

The US Treasury Department has also sanctioned Wang and two other individuals allegedly tied to 911 S5.

Wang is said to have amassed access to nearly 614,000 IP addresses in the US and more than 18 million others worldwide—collectively, forming the botnet. 911 S5’s customers were able to filter the IPs geographically, choosing where they’d like to appear to be located down to a specific US zip code, the DOJ claims.

The indictment states that of the 150 dedicated servers used to manage the botnet, as many as 76 were leased by US-based service providers, including the one hosting 911 S5’s client interface, which allowed criminals overseas to purchase goods using stolen credit cards, in many cases for the alleged purpose of circumventing US export laws.

More than a half million fraudulent claims lodged with pandemic relief programs in the United States are allegedly tied to 911 S5. According to the indictment, nearly $6 billion in losses have been linked to IP addresses captured by 911 S5. Many of the IP addresses have been reportedly tied to more insidious crimes, including bomb threats and the trafficking of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM.

“Proxy services like 911 S5 are pervasive threats that shield criminals behind the compromised IP addresses of residential computers worldwide,” says Damien Diggs, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, where the charges against Wang were brought by a grand jury earlier this month.

Adds Nicole Argentieri, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division: “These criminals used the hijacked computers to conceal their identities and commit a host of crimes, from fraud to cyberstalking.”

At the time of writing, it is unclear whether these virtual impersonations resulted in any criminal investigations or charges against US-based victims whose IP addresses were hijacked as part of the 911 S5 botnet. WIRED is awaiting a response from the Department of Justice regarding this concern.

According to the Justice Department, law enforcement agencies in Singapore, Thailand, and Germany collaborated with US authorities to effect Wang’s arrest.

Wang faces charges of conspiracy, computer fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and conspiracy to money laundering, with a maximum penalty of 65 years in prison. The US is also seeking to seize a mountain of luxury cars and goods allegedly owned by Wang, including a 2022 Ferrari Spider valued at roughly half a million dollars as well as a Patek Philippe watch worth potentially several times that amount.