The hackers, believed to have ties to North Korea, have so far laundered roughly $430,000 of stolen crypto, a fraction of the $6.3 billion stolen, blockchain company Elliptic said in a blog post Monday (Nov. 9).
“Most people think of meme tokens as joke coins whose prices rise and fall on hype,” wrote Tom Robinson, Elliptic co-founder and chief scientist. “North Korea’s launderers have found a different use for them, creating tokens that nobody else wants to buy and using them to disguise the movement of stolen funds.”
The blog post noted that while amounts involved are small so far, the technique costs little to run and could carry much greater sums. The trail can still be followed on-chain, Robinson wrote. The technique slows investigators rather than concealing the funds, and each token is cheap enough to discard.
“Meme coins are launched and traded in their thousands, and most fade within days, so one more short-lived token with a cartoon logo attracts little attention,” Robinson added. “A wallet whose history shows trades in a new meme coin looks like a speculator rather than a launderer, unless someone checks where its money came from.”
Elliptic said it noticed the same tactic being used last year in another heist, the theft of $1.5 billion from the crypto exchange Bybit.
The company has said roughly $3.13 billion remains with the hackers in wallets tied to the heist, chiefly denominated in Bitcoin and Ether.
A report by Bloomberg News on Monday quoted comments made by Binance Co-CEO Richard Teng, who said another $2.85 billion of the stolen crypto was either frozen or intercepted.
Binance announced the heist in late October, with authorities saying the incident may have been carried out by the North Korea-affiliated group TraderTraitor group.
“But while the billions stolen represent the largest cryptocurrency hack in history, what institutional investors will remember more than any alleged state-sanctioned attack is what the experience of getting their money back looks like,” PYMNTS wrote last week. “After all, look no further for proof than FTX, Synapse, or countless other exchange failures for the fact that what matters most for crypto hacks is what happens when customers try to get their money back after it happens.”
