Have meme coins really fallen this low? North Korean hackers’ way of laundering money is apparently to launch their own shitcoins?
On October 29, around $6.3 billion was stolen from Binance—the largest theft on record. The FBI attributed it to North Korean hackers.
From November 5 to 7, they minted at least six one-off meme coins on the NEAR chain. They set up liquidity pools, then used one batch of wallets to buy in with the stolen funds and another batch to sell and take the money out. With the pools in between, it looked just like an ordinary shitcoin trade that had made a profit. Launching each coin cost only about $90.
These six coins saw around $430,000 in total trading volume, almost all of it trades between the hackers’ own wallets. No one on the outside bought in. They abandoned the pools after trading for a few hours, and by November 8, they had mostly withdrawn the liquidity.
This was only a small amount. Around $43 million of the stolen NEAR is still untouched. The on-chain records are all there and can still be traced; this just makes investigators take an extra detour.
The laundering operation was massive, involving more than 20,000 wallets across 16 chains, with a new wallet appearing roughly every 30 seconds. They used this same tactic of launching their own shitcoins when Bybit was hacked last year.
On October 29, around $6.3 billion was stolen from Binance—the largest theft on record. The FBI attributed it to North Korean hackers.
From November 5 to 7, they minted at least six one-off meme coins on the NEAR chain. They set up liquidity pools, then used one batch of wallets to buy in with the stolen funds and another batch to sell and take the money out. With the pools in between, it looked just like an ordinary shitcoin trade that had made a profit. Launching each coin cost only about $90.
These six coins saw around $430,000 in total trading volume, almost all of it trades between the hackers’ own wallets. No one on the outside bought in. They abandoned the pools after trading for a few hours, and by November 8, they had mostly withdrawn the liquidity.
This was only a small amount. Around $43 million of the stolen NEAR is still untouched. The on-chain records are all there and can still be traced; this just makes investigators take an extra detour.
The laundering operation was massive, involving more than 20,000 wallets across 16 chains, with a new wallet appearing roughly every 30 seconds. They used this same tactic of launching their own shitcoins when Bybit was hacked last year.
