Earlier this month, the UN Security Council (UNSC) released an annual report documenting North Korea's efforts to keep millions of dollars flowing into the country despite punishing global sanctions -- and, in the process, the lengths Pyongyang and its trading partners have gone to cover their tracks.

But one section of the 267-page report showed something rather atypical for the normally murky world of sanctions violations: instead of hiding what they were doing, multiple countries named in the report openly declared, in their public customs data, that they had violated UN resolutions and traded illicit goods with the DPRK.