SEOUL, South Korea — Some female college students received emails a few years ago that sounded like a phishing scam, offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for free travel and a spot on South Korea’s Olympic women’s hockey team.
The offers were sincere. Officials in South Korea had apparently scoured online rosters for North American college hockey programs, looking for women with last names that looked as if they might be Korean. They were on a shopping spree to assemble Olympic hockey teams from scratch for the 2018 Winter Games.