back to article Crypto exchanges freeze accounts tied to North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group

Two cryptocurrency exchanges have frozen accounts identified as having been used by North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group. This story starts with a crypto researcher who goes by “ZachXBT” and late last week spotted an entity called “Lazarus Group” moving 41,000 ETH “from the Harmony Bridge hack through Railgun on Jan 13-14 …

  1. veti Silver badge

    Binance exec: "You mean someone deposited 124 BTC and we can just repudiate their ownership? What's the catch?"

    Not sure this redounds greatly to anyone's credit. If the "money" gets returned to where it was stolen from, that would be good I guess.

    1. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

      Re: What's the catch

      The catch is that criminals will think twice before signing cryptocurrency over to Binance because Binance might decide not to credit their account with fiat currency in return. It is the reverse of an FTX which took fiat currency and did not transfer any 'real' cryptocurrency to the wallets of the creditors.

      1. monty75

        Re: What's the catch

        The catch is that criminals will think twice before signing cryptocurrency over to Binance

        And so will everybody else.

    2. Dabooka

      Well it hopefully shows there's a risk dodgy funds will get intercepted. Makes them think twice?

  2. Potemkine! Silver badge

    Lazarus Group should be another nail in the coffin of shittocurrencies.

  3. jmch Silver badge

    Growing Up?

    If crypto wants to be taken seriously in financial circles, that means accepting internationally accepted standards of regulation including blocking criminal activity. Of course in this case the excchanges' interests align with those of law enforcement since this hacker group is targeting exchanges to steal crypto. Remains to be seen whether they will block assets of other known bad actors where they have no skin in the game themselves.

    That's the tightrope to be walked between centralised control, which can be abused at a single control point but offers users some protection, vs complete decentralisation which is a de facto wild west.

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Re: Growing Up?

      The problem isn't really in decentralization per se, but rather with the fact that any Joe Schmo can declare himself part of the infrastructure without having to prove that he knows what he's doing (he doesn't).

    2. tmTM

      Re: Growing Up?

      One of the most fundamental aspects of Crypto's was the ability to stay anonymous.

      This has been shown to be completely false, if anything they are more open as literally anyone can look through the distributed ledger and see what is going on.

      1. Claptrap314 Silver badge

        Re: Growing Up?

        I've not bothered keeping up with everything, but BTC and ETH in particular never attempted to fulfill the coin spec as put forward on the cypherpunks list in the late 90's. Fully anonymous coin is technically possible--the spec has been out for more than twenty years. But it has limitations which apparently have made it undesirable.

  4. lglethal Silver badge
    Go

    Am I reading this right? So $63.5 million was stolen. And now $2.6 million has been frozen/captured? I know Crypto is in meltdown, but I kinda doubt by that much.... ;)

    Well done you caught 4% of the stolen crypto. I'd normally say it's better than nothing, but well frankly, it seems more like a distraction. Move a small amount overtly, so that gets the headlines, so you can move the rest quietly and safely.

    Or did that 3rd exchange who didnt block the stolen crypto (why no naming and shaming??? Assuming you can actually shame someone in crypto, but I digress...), did that 3rd exchange get the vast majority of the funds, probably because it seems they knew they wouldnt get frozen. I guess the Binance and Huobi quantities were a test to see if they could use those exchanges safely or not...

  5. Winkypop Silver badge
    Coat

    Norkocoin

    Now you see it, now you don’t.

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