🚨 Binance Hack Update: Laundering via $NEAR Memecoins
What happened: Elliptic says North Korea-linked hackers moved about $430K from the Oct 29 Binance theft through six newly created memecoins on NEAR (launched Nov 5–7).
How it worked: about 117K NEAR was cycled through self-controlled liquidity pools. The coordinated trades made the stolen funds look like ordinary trading profits.
Context:
• The Oct 29 hack totaled about $6.3–6.4B, the largest in crypto history
• Chainalysis attributes it to North Korea's TraderTraitor group
• About $2.8B had been frozen as of Nov 3
• Separately, the FBI disrupted infrastructure behind "FaceStealer," a North Korea-linked deepfake scam tied to $400M+ in thefts over 18 months. The FBI said it has no information linking it to the Binance hack.
• 2026 hack losses: ~$8.78B (DefiLlama), already a record year
What to watch next: further freezes and recovery updates from Binance, and new laundering routes flagged by analytics firms.
#CryptoSecurity #Hack #Binance #NEAR
What happened: Elliptic says North Korea-linked hackers moved about $430K from the Oct 29 Binance theft through six newly created memecoins on NEAR (launched Nov 5–7).
How it worked: about 117K NEAR was cycled through self-controlled liquidity pools. The coordinated trades made the stolen funds look like ordinary trading profits.
Context:
• The Oct 29 hack totaled about $6.3–6.4B, the largest in crypto history
• Chainalysis attributes it to North Korea's TraderTraitor group
• About $2.8B had been frozen as of Nov 3
• Separately, the FBI disrupted infrastructure behind "FaceStealer," a North Korea-linked deepfake scam tied to $400M+ in thefts over 18 months. The FBI said it has no information linking it to the Binance hack.
• 2026 hack losses: ~$8.78B (DefiLlama), already a record year
What to watch next: further freezes and recovery updates from Binance, and new laundering routes flagged by analytics firms.
#CryptoSecurity #Hack #Binance #NEAR