ZachXBT’s investigation resulted in the freezing of funds by issuers such as Circle and Tether, which resulted in the loss of access to nearly $5 million in stablecoins by Lazarus Group hackers.
Several of them have blocked the funds after tracing them to two accounts associated with this North Korean-backed group. Tether USDT, Circle USDC, Techteryx TUSD, and Paxos BUSD all prevented the group from accessing these illicit funds against two wallets.
ZachXBT’s investigation helped uncover that Lazarus Group hackers had laundered more than $200 million into fiat currency in cryptocurrency for over three years, with the assistance of teams from Metamask, Binance, TRM Labs, and Five I’s LLC. This was a result of 25 distinct blockchain exploits crimes. The hackers are converting stolen crypto into currency by utilizing peer-to-peer marketplaces, according to reports.
The purses still contain an additional $720,000 in the DAI stablecoin and $313,000 in Ethereum that have not been frozen, despite the fact that nearly $5 million of the stablecoins were frozen. ZachXBT publicly criticized Circle, the issuer of USDC, for being slower than the other stablecoin providers in withholding the funds.
The Lazarus Group hackers have been involved in high-profile cybercrimes, which has made them equally feared in the cryptocurrency community as in the global financial system as a whole. They conducted heists that totaled more than $200 million in cryptocurrency. Lazarus Group was responsible for over 60% of the misappropriated funds in the crypto market between 2017 and 2020, as per Chainalysis.
This group employs a variety of laundering methods, such as the transportation of assets through wallets and networks before reaching mixtures such as Tornado Cash and ChipMixer, to obscure their origins.
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