North Korea-linked hackers who stole $6.4 billion from the world’s biggest crypto exchange Binance are reportedly laundering the stolen funds using TRON, Solana, and NEAR-based memecoins.
Crypto security analysts at Elliptic claim to have linked around $430,000 worth of NEAR to the creation of six memecoins themed around various animals, including ducks and chimpanzees.
One of these tokens promotes Elon Musk as the future 2028 president.
Read more: How the Binance hack happened on-chain on Ethereum
Once sold, the profit generated by the tokens is roughly equivalent to the amount of money that went in.
Elliptic believes that the tokens were used for money laundering. This is based on the fact that nobody else was trading them, that they were paid for with the proceeds from a previous linked token launch, and that they were only traded for a short amount of time before never being used again.
It also claims the memecoins attract little attention, are cheap to produce at only $90 per launch, and can slow down investigators’ tracing efforts by introducing more steps to the stolen funds’ journey.
Laundering group has over $43M worth of NEAR tokens
Funding for the memecoins came from hacking group TraderTraitor’s crypto wallet, which contained around $43.7 million worth of NEAR.
Stolen funds were also traced to one token created on the TRON blockchain, and another on Solana.
Elliptic didn’t say what tool was used to create the tokens, nor did it name the decentralised exchange where the funds were sent. It only notes that these entities “did nothing wrong; the launderers simply used them as any other user could.”
Read more: Binance faces second probe over Iran-linked billions
It’s not TraderTraitor’s first memecoin rodeo
Elliptic spotted TraderTraitor carrying out this same memecoin laundering method in the aftermath of last year’s $1.5 billion Bybit hack.
In this case, it used TRON-based memecoins and reportedly moved at least $24 million.
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