Laura Shin interviews North Korean crypto hacker Justin Lim undercover

Laura Shin wanted to see what would happen if you put a suspected North Korean state-sponsored hacker on camera. So she pretended to be a recruiter named Sophie Wang, set up a video interview, and let the man calling himself Justin Lim talk his way through a blockchain engineering screening. He nailed the technical questions. He stumbled, rather conspicuously, on the political ones. The resulting episode of the Unchained podcast, which aired on August 14, 2026, is one of the most unusual pieces of crypto journalism in recent memory. It’s part sting operation, part job interview, and part case study in how the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has turned remote developer work into a funding pipeline for its weapons programs. The interview that wasn’t really a job interview Lim presented himself as a remote developer based in Long Beach, California. On paper, his resume checked a lot of boxes. He demonstrated fluency in smart contract security, discussed indexing protocols like The Graph across multiple networks, and showed familiarity with projects including Uniswap and Velas. The cracks showed up when Shin, still in character as Sophie Wang, steered the conversation toward Nort...