Crypto's most infamous hacking group has lost access to nearly $5 million worth of stablecoins stored in two wallets after stablecoin issuers freezed the funds, which were identified and traced in an investigation led by blockchain sleuth ZachXBT.
In his initial investigation, which was aided by employees from Metamask, Binance, TRM Labs, and Five I's LLC, ZachXBT found that North Korea's state-sponsored Lazarus Group laundered over $200 million in crypto into fiat over a three-year period. The funds were stolen in 25 separate exploits on numerous different blockchains, after which the hackers used a number of accounts at peer-to-peer marketplaces in order to cash out the funds.
The investigation led the issuers behind the stablecoins USDT (Tether), USDC (Circle), TUSD (Techteryx), and BUSD (Paxos) to freeze nearly $5 million in stablecoins belonging to two wallets. The two wallets contain an additional $720,000 worth of the DAI stablecoin and about $313,000 worth of Ethereum, each of which has not been frozen.
“As of today all four stablecoin issuers (Paxos, Tether, Techteryx, Circle) have now blacklisted the two addresses below with $4.96M from Lazarus Group. Another $1.65M is frozen at various exchanges bringing the total frozen from my investigation to $6.98M,” ZachXBT wrote on X.
In posts on X, ZachXBT took specific aim at Circle, the issuer of USDC, for taking longer than the other stablecoin issuers to freeze the tokens. “Took Circle 4.5 months longer than the others but at least everything is frozen now,” one post reads. “[Circle has] 1000+ employees yet no incident response team who blocks after a DeFi or Lazarus Group hack / exploit to safeguard the ecosystem,” ZachXBT said in another.
Circle was unable to be immediately reached by The Block for comment.
