There is a category of analysis for which the usual political language is insufficient. These are the States that abandoned production as an organizing principle and have adopted crime as a business model. North Korea is not the only country with illicit activities, nor the only regime that evades sanctions. This is something qualitatively different, the first State in modern history whose main source of currency is systematic theft, institutionalized and executed with the instruments of sovereign power.
The architecture is coherent. Office 39 of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party is the government body in charge of maintaining the leader’s foreign exchange fund, supervising activities ranging from currency counterfeiting to drug production, controlling in 2010 more than 100 commercial companies and banks in seventeen branches abroad, with assets estimated at $5 billion distributed in Macau, Hong Kong and Europe. And this is the State itself operating as a criminal enterprise.
The inventory of activities is extensive and old. Documented illicit activities include narcotics production and trafficking, counterfeiting of currency and consumer goods, arms trafficking, human trafficking, wildlife trafficking, and conflict minerals smuggling.  For decades, the regime operated poppy plantations on a national scale, with direct instructions from Kim Il Sung to grow opium in 1991 after the cut of Soviet subsidies, producing an estimated one ton of heroin per month and one ton of methamphetamine for export. The response to the emergence of the Asian stimulant market was immediate and Pyongyang redirected industrial capacity towards the production of high purity methamphetamine. According to specialized analysts, the regime also produces large quantities of counterfeit Viagra, fentanyl and other synthetic narcotics that circulate in North American markets. 
In terms of monetary counterfeiting, North Korea reached a technical level that forced the United States Treasury to redesign the one hundred dollar bill. The Secret Service was categorical in stating that the “super tickets“North Koreans are the most perfect in the world, with a technical sophistication that shows a well-financed criminal enterprise with top-level scientific components. In short, the falsification It was not a marginal business: It was state-funded precision engineering.
Weapons are another vector with sales of artillery ammunition to Russia that could generate $1 billion in revenue for the regime. According to the consulting firm RAND, North Korea has a presence in proliferation activities in 38 of 54 African countries, including arms sales, covert smuggling and illicit financing; while their sales destabilize approximately 15% of the continent, the Sahel in particular.
But the most significant evolution is digital. Starting in the 2010s, the regime built the most cost-effective per capita offensive cyber capability on the planet. A 2024 UN Security Council report established that malicious cyber activities generate 50% of North Korea’s foreign exchange earnings and fund 40% of its weapons of mass destruction programs. In 2025, for the second year in a row, North Korean cryptocurrency theft operations broke their own record, racking up $2.02 billion that year, bringing the total stolen since 2016 to $6.75 billion.  A single hit, the hack of the Bybit exchange in February 2025, resulted in the theft of approximately $1.5 billion in virtual assets in a single operation, attributed by the FBI to the TraderTraitor group. 
By 2025, North Korean attacks accounted for 76% of all cryptocurrency service compromises globally, achieving greater results with fewer incidents, demonstrating increasing sophistication and patience.  The laundering pattern is equally precise, with the regime showing systematic preference for Chinese-language laundering services, protocols and broker networks, with a laundering cycle of approximately 45 days following major thefts. 
The fake worker scheme, which has just expanded to Europe, is the most recent and revealing piece of this system. The operators create false identities, obtain remote employment at technology companies, and transfer their salaries to the regime through networks of facilitators who manage bank accounts and corporate laptops on Western soil. The most recent mutation goes further, with workers exfiltrating proprietary data upon being hired and, upon being fired, demanding six-figure cryptocurrency ransoms under threat of handing over sensitive information to competitors. It is no longer just wage theft, but systemic corporate penetration with intelligence and extortion capacity.
What emerges from this inventory is a State doctrine. Academics specializing in national security coined the category of “criminal sovereignty” to describe a State where the government does not tolerate or extract income from criminal activities, but rather directs them directly from the highest levels of power. The difference with, for example, a State captured by drug trafficking is structural because there crime infiltrates the State; Here the State is the criminal organization.
The central strategic consequence is the one that is least discussed because this model is invulnerable to conventional instruments of pressure. Sanctions do not work because the regime does not depend on legitimate trade. Conventional military deterrence does not work in the face of a nuclear arsenal that makes any attack prohibitive. The main challenge of sanctions is compliance, and it is the responsibility of each state, although many often lack the resources to inspect shipments, and in 2022 Russia and China vetoed a proposal to expand sanctions in the Security Council for the first time. The diplomatic shield of Beijing and Moscow closes the only multilateral channel that could generate real pressure.
What exists, then, is only defense. Better hiring processes, better controls in exchanges of cryptocurrencies, best identity verification tools. None of this reduces the regime’s offensive capacity, although it marginally raises the cost of each individual operation, forcing adaptations that the regime proves to execute with considerable speed and efficiency.
The question that conventional analysis avoids is whether the world is facing a temporary anomaly or a model that could be replicated. A State that abandons production, adopts digital crime as a primary source of income, shields its impunity with nuclear weapons and operates with the bureaucratic discipline of a formal government is not a passing historical aberration but a proof of concept. And so far, the validation is successful.
Things as they are
Mookie Tenembaum addresses international issues like this every week with Horacio Cabak on his podcast El Observador Internacional, available on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and all platforms.
