Taiwanese DeFi project Scallop said it encountered a suspicious engineering job approach that its founder, Kris Lai, believed could be linked to North Korean IT worker tactics. According to Lai, a Telegram account named Yuto Kazuma, claiming to be a blockchain engineer based in Tokyo, contacted him on Aug. 19 and said he had studied Scallop’s GitHub, Sui lending protocol, Sui Kit, Scallop SDK, and a newer AI Skill integration. The applicant also described experience across blockchain infrastructure, backend systems, distributed services, Solana RPC and WebSocket infrastructure, transaction pipelines, smart contracts, and AI agents. Instead of moving into a normal interview process, Lai replied with a blunt verification request: record a FaceTime video saying 「Kim Jong-un is an ugly pig」. He later said the account blocked him within hours. Lai viewed the exchange through the lens of a broader security concern that has drawn repeated warnings from U.S. authorities: North Korean remote IT workers using false identities to secure overseas tech jobs, collect salaries, and in some cases gain access to internal systems. The report also points to prior estimates that such operations generated billions of dollars over two years, alongside court cases in the United States involving so-called laptop farms used to make overseas workers appear to be operating from inside the country. Scallop, a DeFi lending protocol on Sui, said in 2024 that it had raised a cumulative $3 million.