How North Korea Launders Billions in Stolen Crypto
How North Korea Launders Billions in Stolen Crypto
The Hermit Kingdom, which intelligence agencies say was behind the $1.5 billion Bybit hack, faces “offramping” challenges due to the size of its hauls.
I’m actually surprised that DPRK is unable to launder all that crypto. You would think that the crypto community would have at this point created fatter laundering pipelines.
Something I have been pondering is why when going after Bitcoin from crimes (ransom or stolen) they don't just declare the individual "coins" stemming from illegal proceedings and that when they show up the "coins" will be confiscated and the holders investigated for money laundering. They have a serial number of sorts, right?
It should decrease the trade value of the "coins", might even have the added benefit of scaring people of from the scam currencies. Ay, there might be the rub, for in this modern world of ours suppressing financial "innovations" is treated as worse than scams.
the other two answers are correct, but also they totally do. In particular, the blockchain analysis companies alert companies using their services to the transaction touching tainted coins. This is variably effective, of course.
But also, there are plenty of non-US/EU exchanges that don't give a hoot and once tainted coins hit an exchange they're washed because these exchanges are very good at having pretend KYC/AML.
Ok, that makes sense.
I was somehow under the impression that the main wild cat money to real money exchange was to USD, on account of the media about such exchanges. The rest followed.
Bitcoins aren't really discrete individual units like that. Imagine you send me 0.1 bitcoin and my mom sends me 0.1 bitcoin and I then send 0.1 bitcoin to Alice (ignore transaction fees and such). It's not really a meaningful question whether the sum Alice received was the fraction of a "coin" I received from you, from my mom or some specific mixture of both. The blockchain just records increases and decreases of a wallet's balance.
It’s not really a meaningful question whether the sum Alice received was the fraction of a “coin” I received from you
Ish. If you received a million CSAM’n’heroin bucks, and you give 10 bucks to Alice, there’s a transaction history that now links Alice’s wallet to CSAM’n’heroin which can indeed be a problem for Alice, because cautious exchanges might now freeze her assets until she can offer some proof that she’s not doing anything bad.
There’s a bitcoin wallet attack that uses this trick that was mentioned recently, maybe here, maybe on web3igjg. You can argue the bitcoins aren’t the same, but in practise no-one cares.
eta: this is apparently called a “dust attack” and I first heard about it here: https://awful.systems/post/3463061
Merely interacting with a sanctioned wallet is enough to get or treated with suspicion, let alone receiving funds. Pecunia certainly olets these days.
Unfortunately, the coins are hard to track. They get exchanged for other cryptocurrencies and mixed in with other large wallets so noone can tell where the coins originally came from.