David Head is CEO of Endorsed, a San Francisco identity verification startup that uses AI to screen candidates. That task includes detecting signs of potential imposters and fraudsters, which these days includes a torrent of North Korean operatives posing as IT workers, who over the past several years have snuck into hundreds of U.S. companies.
Endorsed, which Head co-founded with CTO Kevin Fu, has analyzed more than 11 million job applications for fraud and is backed by Joe Montana’s Liquid 2 Ventures, Pioneer Fund, and angels including Micah Smurthwaite, said Head. The firm analyzed a sample of 175,000 job applications for all role types in 2026 across U.S. companies ranging from three to 25,000+ employees, where the application was flagged as having mid-to high-risk patterns associated with North Korean IT worker schemes. If you aren’t aware, men from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have been forced to pose as workers seeking IT jobs so they can funnel their earnings into authoritarian ruler Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons program, according to the UN.
Among U.S.-based remote IT roles, where Head says the fraud is most concentrated, applications carrying those patterns went from 11% of the total in the third quarter of 2024 to 44% a year later. Endorsed estimates that, for the most recent quarter, the rate was a whopping 47%.
