The North Korean government, struggling under the weight of international sanctions, has for years seeded companies in the United States and elsewhere with remote tech workers camouflaged by false and stolen identifies to generate desperately needed revenue, federal prosecutors say.

Taking advantage of the global demand for skilled tech employees and the rise in remote employment, the North Korean regime has found a way to work around United Nations and United States sanctions imposed on it for its nuclear weapons program, the prosecutors said in two indictments unsealed in federal district courts in Massachusetts and Georgia. It has also used the access to steal both money and information, they said.

“Thousands of North Korean cyber-operatives have been trained and deployed by the regime to blend into the global digital work force,” Leah Foley, the chief federal prosecutor in Massachusetts, said in announcing the charges on Monday. She called the threat “both real and immediate.”

On Monday, federal law enforcement authorities took a series of actions across 16 states aimed at shutting down the scheme. Investigators seized dozens of financial accounts and fraudulent websites and searched “laptop farms” that allowed North Korean operatives to gain access to the computers that companies provide their off-site employees, prosecutors said.

In recent years, North Korean attempts to evade sanctions using false identities have been increasingly been raising alarm. There is evidence that the operation has expanded geographically, targeting Europe in particular, according to a report from the Google Threat Intelligence Group in April.

Last year, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. launched an initiative to identify people in the United States believed to be helping North Koreans advance the plots, some of them without their knowledge.