Stolen webcam clips of 900+ victims feed North Korea’s $400 million fake Zoom scheme

North Korean state-sponsored hackers exploited human trust by impersonating legitimate video call participants using stolen webcam recordings of previous victims, creating a self-reinforcing pool of deceptive footage. Each new victim's recording was harvested and recycled to deceive the next target, compounding the harm of every successful attack. The scheme specifically targeted cryptocurrency and Web3 workers, who frequently transact high-value assets with relatively low institutional oversight. This matters because it demonstrates that social engineering attacks can bypass technical controls entirely when users lack the awareness to verify the authenticity of who they are communicating with in real time.