After the stablecoin issuer froze the funds, cryptocurrency’s most notorious hacking group lost access to about $5 million worth of stablecoins stored in two wallets. An investigation led by blockchain detective ZachXBT identified and traced the funds.
In his initial investigation, with the help of staff from Metamask, Binance, TRM Labs, and Five I’s LLC, ZachXBT discovered that North Korea’s state-sponsored Lazarus Group had laundered over $200 million in cryptocurrency into fiat currency over a three-year period. The funds were stolen through 25 separate exploits on multiple blockchains, after which the hackers cashed out the funds using multiple accounts on P2P marketplaces.
The investigation led the issuers of the USDT (Tether), USDC (Circle), TUSD (Techteryx), and BUSD (Paxos) stablecoins to freeze approximately $5 million worth of stablecoins in two wallets. The two wallets also contained an additional $720,000 worth of DAI stablecoin and approximately $313,000 worth of Ethereum, each of which was not frozen.
“As of today, all four stablecoin issuers (Paxos, Tether, Techteryx, Circle) have blacklisted the two addresses below with $4.96 million from the Lazarus Group. $1.65 million is frozen on various exchanges, bringing the total frozen amount to $6.98 million according to my research,” ZachXBT wrote on X.
In a post on X, ZachXBT specifically criticized USDC issuer Circle for taking longer to freeze tokens than other stablecoin issuers. “Circle took 4.5 months longer than other issuers, but at least everything is frozen now,” one post reads. “(Circle) has 1,000+ employees and does not have an incident response team to shut down DeFi or protect the ecosystem after a Lazarus Group hack/exploit,” ZachXBT said in another post.
The Block did not immediately reach out to Circle for comment.
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