WASHINGTON (The Thursday Times) — The United States has obtained court approval to seize or restrain more than $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency stolen from the Binance exchange last month, the Justice Department said on Thursday. It blamed the theft on members of North Korea’s military.
The department said hackers it calls “TraderTraitor” stole more than $6 billion in digital assets from Binance on or about October 29. Since then, US agencies and private companies have frozen more than $2.7 billion of the stolen funds, and the department has court authorisation to seize or restrain more than $1.2 billion of that.
“The Criminal Division … and our law enforcement partners played the critical role in immediately freezing billions of dollars’ worth of stolen Binance digital assets before they got beyond law enforcement reach,” said A. Tysen Duva, the assistant attorney general who heads the department’s Criminal Division. He said the division had moved “to immediately halt about half of this historic breach”.
The department said efforts to trace and recover the rest were continuing, as the hackers kept moving the assets through cryptocurrency bridges, mixers, and exchanges. Last week the FBI, the Secret Service, and the tax authority’s criminal investigators issued an alert asking crypto platforms to block transactions linked to the addresses being used to launder the funds.
Deepfake video calls
In a separate action, the department said it had seized cloud servers used in a North Korean scheme the FBI calls “FaceStealer”. It said the scheme had stolen more than $400 million in cryptocurrency over the past 18 months.
According to the department, the hackers invite targets to video meetings from accounts stolen from earlier victims. Once a target joins, they record the target’s webcam and play prerecorded footage of people the target knows, or deepfake videos of well-known figures in the crypto industry, to win their trust. They then fake a technical fault, such as a sound problem, and send a link to “fix” it that installs malware.
The FBI seized more than 900 webcam videos of victims under a federal warrant, the department said. It said the hackers had also begun targeting people who maintain open-source software, in what appeared to be an attempt to set up attacks on the software supply chain.
“The North Korean regime relies on proceeds from large-scale cryptocurrency theft to fund its illicit weapons program, stealing billions of dollars in recent years,” said Brett Leatherman, operations director of the FBI’s cyber branch.
Pyongyang denies role
The Binance theft is the largest crypto heist on record. The FBI blamed North Korea for it at the start of the month, and Binance has said the attackers got in through a fake job interview. Pyongyang has called the accusations “absurd” and denied any role.
Binance reopened withdrawals after covering most of the losses, and customers pulled billions of dollars from the exchange in the days that followed.
