UN sanctions watchers have noted that North Korea was involved in laundering $147.5 million worth of cryptocurrency stolen from an exchange. According to a Reuters report, North Korean perpetrators laundered the stolen cryptocurrency through the Tornado Cash crypto platform in March.
UN sanctions monitors handed over a confidential document to the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee on Friday. From the document, accessed by Reuters, the observers examined 97 cyber attacks on crypto companies carried out by North Korean suspects over the past seven years, worth some $3.6 billion.
Moreover, North Korea is suspected of being behind 11 cryptocurrency thefts worth a total of $54.7 million this year alone. „These may have been carried out by DPRK IT workers inadvertently employed by small cryptocurrency-related companies,” the document reads.
One of the major attacks was the theft of $147.5 million worth of cryptocurrencies from the HTX cryptocurrency exchange in 2023.
According to a report by blockchain forensics firm Elliptic, the North Korean Lazarus group was involved in the theft of $112.5 million worth of cryptocurrency from the HTX cryptocurrency exchange and its interchain bridge, the HECO Bridge.
As of March 13, 2024, more than $100 million from this hack was laundered through Tornado Cash, branded as Elliptic.
Tornado Cash is a cryptocurrency mixer running on the Ethereum blockchain and indiscriminately facilitates anonymous transactions by hiding their origin, destination and counterparties.
The U.S. Treasury Department’sOffice of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed sanctions on Tornado Cash on August 8, 2022. Authorities accused them of enabling hackers to launder $7 billion worth of cryptocurrencies as of 2019.
The cryptocurrency mixer faced worldwide uproar after its creator Alexei Persev was charged with money laundering. He was later arrested in the Netherlands in August 2022, when Tornado Cash was blacklisted by the US government. On Tuesday, Pertsev was convicted of money laundering by the Dutch court of s-Hertogenbosch.
