There are a few different angles to this. Other people have already mentioned the North Korean state-sponsored espionage, but honestly I think this is a small minority of this market.

The other two big ones are visa fraud and employment fraud. With the first one, you have a developer, possibly even skilled in a low-wage overseas company (say Thailand) that wants to make American wages. If he applies as who he actually is, he makes Thai wages, which can be as low as $10K/year. If he uses your identity to apply, he makes American wages, say $200K+/year. He can split that with you and make 10x what he would otherwise, while you get $100K/year for doing nothing (assuming he's honest enough to pay out, which is not a guarantee. There's no honor in thieves).

With the second, they use his interview skills and your identity to get the job, and then do nothing except get other jobs. It's remarkably hard to fire a U.S. employee without risks of lawsuits. If the employer does seem to catch on, he has a lawyer and a psychiatrist on the payroll too. The psychiatrist produces a doctor's note that you are disabled, the lawyer threatens to sue if you are fired. "You" go on disability, where you can stay for up to a year and they can't fire you. Collect the salary, move on after the year. In the meantime, "you" (or the organization using your identity) has done the same thing to hundreds of other corporations. I personally know 2 managers that have been victimized by this scam.

In all 3 cases, you're not the direct victim of the scam. They're using your identity as a shield to legitimize the scam. When it's discovered, it's you who suffer the reputational risk and/or criminal charges.

There's multipronged benefit for them: Access to company infrastructure to potentially cause harm or ransom in the future, access to technology / intelligence, but also simply foreign currency.

"Arizona woman to serve 8 years for identity theft scheme benefiting North Korea": https://www.npr.org/2025/07/25/nx-s1-5479906/north-korea-ide...

As other have pointed out, there are multiple types of scammers here.

The most benign are people who just want US salaries. The most malicious is North Korea who will go as far as installing ransomware and infiltrating financial institutions (especially crypto) to steal user money.

We know North Korea is much of the problem since the FBI gets involved in the malicious cases that I described and they publish reports. It’s hard to tell though because companies want to keep news they are infiltrated as quiet as possible.

I’m not sure which type of fraudster sent you this email other than the rate they are saying they will pay (50%) is exceptionally high. We know the North Koreans pay 10% for using your identity for ID verification etc, and 20% if you are the front man.

Nostrademons wrote a great comment about how they can use your identity here in problematic ways. I’m not sure how much this has happened since I have yet to hear about it in private stories from employers, who tend to be pretty candid. From what I can tell the fraudsters want to stay under the radar and be employed as long as possible. A lot are great engineers so they pull it off.

That said, rarely do people want to talk about this topic who are involved so it’s hard to tell what fully happens in each scenario.

* malicious: hostile actors want to gain footholds into companies - North Korea, etc

* benign: people in lower income countries want to do the job and can make good profit even when giving half the salary to you.

For the second option, some are scams and only want to pocket a month or two of salary without delivering before the company fires them. Others actually deliver and can keep the arrangement going long-term.

Be careful they might try and use your identity to then commit more fraud.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41641446

  Recently my friend was approached by a Telugu broker stating that he would pay 10k for a part time job ... My friend agreed to a tech stack and he was connected with one of his US clients and he started sharing his screen and gave him his entire sprint's work.

  There are thousands of such [Non-resident Indians] especially from Andhra, Telangana going to USA not learning anything about industry, these people have no coding knowledge, can't even explain their work properly to [3rd parties]. They [earn] 6 digit USD [and pay] these brokers some 40-50K Rupees [$6000] every month and outsourcing it to a jobless Indian. Brokers eat away most of the money and pay the end person around 10k [$100].

  The worst part, my friend said it would take around 40 hrs a month (2 hrs everyday) to complete this US client's sprint tasks (client works for a major [Multi-National Corp for] ~120k USD/year, while my friend gets 10k rupees/month [$100/mo].