Over the last three years, Minh Phuong Ngoc Vong, a U.S. citizen, pulled down $970,000 working at a nail salon in Bowie, Maryland.
But Vong wasn't just filing nails.
He was also filing applications at U.S. tech companies for IT and development jobs, some of which had government contracts requiring security clearance. However, Vong wasn't performing any of the duties at those jobs; he was outsourcing all his work virtually to China and North Korea.
This alone is sketchy. But the reason he was caught shows the true severity of the crime.
An unnamed Virginia-based tech company wanted to include him on a job that needed more security clearance, but when they submitted his credentials to the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency for a secret clearance, he was flagged as having another job with security clearance, namely working with the Federal Aviation Administration.
The Virginia company fired him for having more than one job, but when the CEO showed his picture to the lead-developer, they realized that the man they hired was not the same one who was showing up to virtual meetings and doing the work.
As a result of Vong's fraudulent misrepresentations, these government agencies unknowingly granted Vong's co-conspirators access to sensitive U.S. government systems, which they accessed from China.
Tl;dr: Vong got security clearance for a government contract job then he subcontracted that out to China and basically gave the ChiComms access to government secrets.
The sad part is that Vong himself has no degree and no experience in IT. Literally, the only thing he did was plug a company-provided laptop in at home and install remote access programs on it, so that it looked like it was being operated in the U.S.
Apparently, this is such a widespread practice in the U.S. that the National Security Division and the FBI's Cyber and Counterintelligence Divisions, have an entire division allocated to rooting out and dismantling laptop farms.
‘Even if these actors are primarily financially motivated, the risk they pose to critical infrastructure is enormous,' John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google's Threat Intelligence Group, told Fortune. ‘This scheme has become so widespread that targeting of these organizations is almost inevitable. Given their connection to the intelligence services, that kind of access could be a nightmare.'
Vong pled guilty to several counts of international wire fraud and faces up to 20 years in prison.
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