North Korea’s $6.3B Binance Hack Takes a Strange Turn With Meme Coins

North Korean launderers have turned to disposable meme coins to disguise proceeds from Binance’s roughly $6.3 billion hack. Elliptic identified related tactics on three blockchains, adding cheap, repeatable obstacles to efforts to trace the stolen assets. North Korean launderers used meme coins and obscure tokens on Tron, Solana, and Near, Elliptic co-founder and chief scientist Tom Robinson explained on Nov. 9. Tron and Near involved newly created coins; Solana relied on existing assets. On Near, one group bought the new coins with stolen cryptocurrency through token liquidity pools .