Two weeks after one of the largest thefts in the history of digital money, American investigators have recovered a big piece of the loot. The Justice Department said a court had cleared it to take control of, or block, crypto assets worth over $1.2 billion taken from the exchange Binance, which lost upwards of $6 billion in a break-in on October 29.
The FBI pins the raid on TraderTraitor, its label for a unit of North Korean military hackers with a long record of emptying crypto platforms. US officials say such heists help keep Pyongyang’s government and weapons programmes afloat, and the department presented the seizure as part of a broader push against that business model.
Speed made the difference. In the hours after the attack, companies across the industry moved to lock up stolen tokens, led by stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle, and the total frozen so far stands at about $2.7 billion. A senior official said roughly half of the haul had been halted before it slipped out of reach. The rest is still moving. Blockchain analysts report that the launderers have been creating tokens of no value and routing funds through decentralised trading pools so that stolen wallets never touch receiving wallets directly, a variation of the method used after the $1.4 billion Bybit theft last year.
Alongside the Binance news, authorities said they had dismantled cloud servers behind a separate North Korean scam the FBI calls FaceStealer. Victims are invited to video calls by hijacked accounts and shown recordings or deepfakes of people they know; a staged glitch then persuades them to install malicious software. Over the past year and a half, the operation is thought to have brought in upwards of $400 million. An FBI official in Los Angeles warned that anyone who believes they could never be fooled is not imagining hard enough.
