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North Korea is successfully evading United Nations sanctions with increasingly sophisticated methods, enabling the regime to import more oil, expand coal exports, sell weapons and hack into foreign banks, according to a report by a U.N. panel of experts.

The sanctions are designed to prevent Pyongyang from funding its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs and thereby pressure the regime to abandon its arsenal, but North Korea has carved out new ways to flout the U.N. sanctions, including deceiving global banks, insurers and commodity traders, said the U.N. panel's report, which was reviewed by NBC News and was published Tuesday.

The head of the U.N. panel of experts, Hugh Griffiths, told NBC News in an exclusive interview that he had never seen such elaborate smuggling methods in his 15 years of tracking maritime trafficking.

"They’re using more sophisticated methods. They’re becoming cleverer," Griffiths said.

The regime is also violating sanctions by selling small arms and other military hardware to Iranian-backed Houthi rebel forces in Yemen, and to fighters in Libya and Sudan, the panel report said.

Click here to read the report

According to the report, the North is also proving adept at cybertheft to secure cash, stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign banks with vulnerable cybersecurity software or from cryptocurrency accounts, which are particularly difficult to track.

North Korea "continues to defy Security Council resolutions through a massive increase in illegal ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum products and coal," the report states.

"These violations render the latest United Nations sanctions ineffective by flouting the caps on the import of petroleum products and coal oil" by North Korea imposed by the U.N. Security Council in 2017. "These transfers have increased in scope, scale and sophistication," it said.

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The U.N. panel's report describes a case last year in which the North Koreans allegedly engaged in identify theft on the high seas, using a blacklisted vessel as an imposter for a similar ship thousands of miles away. The Yuk Tang falsely transmitted its identity through the global electronic tracking system for ships, claiming it was a Panama-flagged vessel named Maika, says the report. The real vessel, whose international ID number was stolen, was 7,000 miles away in the Gulf of Guinea.