What do salmon fillets, fake eyelashes and animated children’s TV shows all have in common? All these familiar parts of Western daily lives have recently been touched by North Korean labour. In an online shopping world where many consumers hit the “sort by price” button, North Korea’s combination of low-cost and high-skilled labour is irresistible for contractors with a tight bottom line.

The problem goes beyond the uncomfortable ethics of forced labour. These exports directly support the North Korean regime, funding both the lavish lifestyles of party elites and the nuclear-missile programme of Kim Jong Un, the hermit kingdom’s autocratic leader. Because this income is so important, his regime continues to find ways to dodge sanctions and sneak into international supply chains.

Take seafood. North Korea profits off virtually every stage of production. The fish itself may be of North Korean origin. Smaller Chinese fishing companies often buy permits from North Korean companies, probably to escape overfishing rules in Chinese territorial waters. A study in 2020 by Global Fishing Watch, a watchdog, found that about a third of China’s distant-water fleets fished in North Korean waters. Much of the catch from along the North Korean coast is then shipped to Chinese hubs, such as Dandong, for processing. Thousands of North Korean women work long days inside cold storage rooms cleaning, gutting and packaging seafood to be sent all over the world. According to various investigations, clams and squid have found their way onto South Korean e-commerce platforms, while salmon fillets have reached the shelves of an American chain of grocery shops.

Such slipperiness is not unique to the fishing industry. Strictly speaking, wigs and false eyelashes are among the few things North Korea can export legally under UN sanctions, mostly to China. They netted the regime an estimated $167m in 2023. While these hair products are made by a mixture of freelancing housewives, factory workers and prison inmates, all of them are relabelled as “Made in China” with no way to distinguish whether the hands that made them did so voluntarily. DailyNK, an investigative website, estimates that 90% of North Korean hair products are made by prisoners.

Removing North Korean workers from the supply chain, however, is no easy task. When an investigation in 2024 by Outlaw Ocean Project, an outfit focused on marine crimes, revealed that Chinese companies selling seafood products were employing North Korean workers, South Korean giants Lotte and Coupang suspended sales of those products.

Yet it is not as simple as blacklisting offending companies, says Joanna Hosaniak, deputy director-general of the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, an NGO in Seoul. Ms Hosaniak’s team has tracked North Korean labour across coal, wig-making, garment manufacturing and other industries. “Whatever you start tracking, they will move to another sector,” she says. With a workforce that has no say in what it produces and is eager for a chance at lucrative foreign work, it is easy for companies to pivot quickly in response to sanctions or boycotts.

Indeed North Korean companies are now casting their net wider. The pandemic and the switch to remote work opened up a whole new range of new ways for them to earn hard currency. Instead of hiding at the bottom of an opaque supply chain, IT workers started to use fabricated identities, AI-altered photos and accomplices in America to land remote-work positions across the tech world, including for a number of Fortune 500 companies, according to America’s Justice Department. The roughly $300 a month that a seafood factory-worker in China earns for the regime (because of state quotas and taxes, the regime gets about 90% of all earnings) is small fry compared with the $10,000 a month North Korean IT workers are said to be required to earn by the government.

Kim Seung-joo, from Korea University’s school of cybersecurity, worries that North Korea’s infiltration of the global tech sector positions the rogue state to pilfer corporate secrets or build back doors into trusted Western-based software that can be used for future cyber-attacks. Its hackers are already highly successful. In a global economy, an educated workforce willing to perform demanding work for 12 hours a day at half the cost of its rivals is appealing. North Korea may be isolated, but its workforce increasingly is not.