Meet Kim Kwang Jin, a former North Korean official who made tens of millions of dollars for the country’s nuclear program.
How did he do it? He helped run a fake insurance firm to scam major companies all over Europe.
He used what’s called a re-insurance scam. It works like this: If you have a car accident, your insurance company pays you for damages. That insurance company also has its own insurance, called re-insurance. Likewise, the insurance company Kim helped manage had its own re-insurance policies from major re-insurers, he said.
Kim’s company made wild claims about major fires at buildings that didn’t even exist, as well as claims about deaths that never even happened. Under the terms of his company’s contracts with the re-insurance companies, any disputes had to be resolved in North Korea’s kangaroo courts, where victory for his company was guaranteed. The contracts his company signed with re-insurers also stipulated that investigators were not allowed into North Korea to verify whether any of these insurance claims were true. In the end, re-insurers paid out tens of millions of dollars, he said. And a chunk of that money went to finance North Korea’s nuclear program.
Now, North Korea considers the US to be public enemy no. 1, and has recently said it could test an ICBM — which theoretically could reach a city like Los Angeles — any time it wants. In recent weeks, however, the North’s brutal leader Kim Jong Un has been quiet. That could mean he’s trying to figure out U.S. President Donald Trump’s next move. Or, it could mean North Korea’s leader is afraid of the brash and often unpredictable Trump.
Incidentally, North Korea’s leader, when he came to power, had his own uncle killed. His uncle oversaw the operations of the company Kim Kwang Jin (our interviewee in the above video) helped run.
Borderless News Online caught up with Kim at a coffee shop in Seoul, where he told us how he set up a fake business, and how major re-insurance companies never suspected for a minute what he was up to. He suspected that brokers on the re-insurers’ end were making large fees, and that could have been why no one asked any questions.
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