Amazon has blocked more than 1,800 job applications from suspected North Korean agents for remote IT jobs using stolen or fake identities, reports BBC News.

Amazon's chief security officer Stephen Schmidt said in a LinkedIn post that Amazon has seen a nearly one-third increase in job applications from North Koreans in the past year. He said operatives typically work with people managing "laptop farms," which are computers based in the U.S. that are run remotely from outside of the country.

"Their objective is typically straightforward: get hired, get paid, and funnel wages back to fund the regime's weapons programs," he said, adding that this subterfuge is likely to be happening at scale across the industry, especially in the U.S., but that Amazon has used artificial intelligence to catch them.

The U.S. government warned in June that it had uncovered 29 "laptop farms" that were being operated illegally across the country by North Korean IT workers.

They used stolen or forged identities of Americans to help North Korean nationals get jobs in the U.S., said the Department of Justice.