Binance hack funds worth $430K traced through 6 NEAR memecoins – Report

The tremors of the Binance exploit are still being felt, as, according to a recent report by Elliptic, the North Korean hackers are using a new method to launder stolen cryptocurrency by creating their own worthless meme tokens.

Instead of transferring stolen funds directly between wallets, they are routing them through decentralized exchange (DEX) liquidity pools. This is done to make it harder and more time-consuming for investigators to trace where the money goes.

Details of the funds laundered

This time, the hacker started by creating a new cryptocurrency token using publicly available token-launch platforms. Soon after that, they paired this token with a legitimate asset, such as Near Protocol [NEAR] or a stablecoin, in a liquidity pool on a DEX. 

Providing more insights on the matter, the report added, 

Each of the six NEAR tokens carries a logo in classic meme coin style…The names follow meme coin habits too, from a crude joke (FUK) to an echo of the “-INU” dog coins (SINU).

They then used wallets holding stolen funds to buy the newly created token.

Finally, another set of wallets sold those tokens back into the same pool and withdrew legitimate crypto assets. Now since the liquidity pool sat between the buying and selling wallets, there was no direct transfer of stolen funds between them.