In brief
- North Korea’s launderers are creating home-made meme coins and swapping stolen Binance funds through decentralized-exchange liquidity pools so no funds move directly between thief and recipient wallets, Elliptic found.
- The clearest case appeared on Near, where six disposable tokens (with logos including a monkey, a duck and Elon Musk) each cost around $90 to mint.
- The amounts are small against the $3 billion-plus still unlaundered, and the trail stays traceable—it just buys time, a technique Elliptic first saw in the 2025 Bybit theft.
North Korea’s hackers have found a novel use for the internet’s favorite joke tokens: laundering a slice of the record $6.4 billion stolen from Binance.
According to a report from…
