🔥🔥🔥 Guys, these days even hackers are getting creative with money laundering.
We recently talked about that staggering, multi-billion-dollar heist at Binance. At the time, everyone thought the funds would be frozen or moved, and things would gradually die down. But what happened? These hackers (most likely North Korea’s TraderTraitor group) gave security experts a lesson.
Think they’d use some sophisticated mixer or cross-chain bridge? Nope. They went straight for a “meme coin assembly line”—and muddied the waters for just $90.
An absurd tool for the crime: a Musk campaign token?
According to the latest report from blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, hackers have discovered a new money-laundering blind spot: laundering dirty money through liquidity pools on decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
How clever is this trick? They use the NEAR and Tron networks to conjure up worthless meme coins in just minutes. The logos on these coins are extremely “abstract”:
A monkey wearing a bow tie
A duck draped in a flag
Some even photoshopped an image of Musk “running for president in 2028” and launched a coin (even Musk himself had no idea someone had made a coin in his name).
What do they do with these tokens? Between November 5 and 7, the hackers minted six coins like these, each costing just 25 NEAR (about $90) to create. It’s practically cheaper than printing counterfeit cash.
The full money-laundering process revealed: moving money from one hand to the other without a trace
Their operation is practically “textbook”:
1. Create a pool: First, make a fake meme coin and add it to a DEX liquidity pool, pairing it with real NEAR tokens or stablecoins.
2. Buy with one hand: Use stolen funds (NEAR) to buy up their own fake coin in the pool.
3. Sell with the other hand: Use another, clean wallet to sell the fake coins and withdraw “clean” NEAR or stablecoins from the pool.
The result: a “liquidity pool” sits between the dirty money and the clean wallet. On-chain, it looks like an ordinary retail trader made money trading some obscure dog-themed coin and cashed out, perfectly severing the link between the funds.
Although these six coins laundered only $430,000 in stolen funds in total, this is a classic case of “testing the waters.” Once the method works, scaling it up and repeating it is only a matter of time.
More than $3 billion is still sitting on-chain, waiting to be laundered. These hackers are now acting like bots, creating a new wallet every 25 seconds in an attempt to muddy the waters as much as possible before they’re caught.
Although Elliptic stresses that this method cannot truly hide the funds, which remain traceable on-chain, it’s a major warning for ordinary retail traders and compliance teams alike:
Don’t mess around with obscure dog-themed meme coins! Especially fake coins that suddenly appear on DEXs, have bizarre names, and have extremely low liquidity. You might think you’re jumping in to make a quick trade, but you could actually be helping hackers cash out—or even exposing your wallet address to law-enforcement action.
A nightmare for compliance teams: If you receive funds on-chain from a liquidity pool like this, you could face the risk of having them frozen in the future—even if you didn’t know they were proceeds of crime.
These hackers have shown that in the decentralized world, the cost of crime is getting lower and lower, while the methods are becoming increasingly absurd.
What’s the most outrageous meme coin you’ve seen on-chain? Do you think this kind of “on-chain money laundering” can ultimately evade detection? Let’s talk in the comments!
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