In brief – North Korea’s launderers are creating home-made meme coins and swapping stolen Binance funds through decentralized-exchange liquidity pools so no funds move directly between thief and recipient wallets, Elliptic found. – The clearest case appeared on Near, where six…
sposable tokens (with logos including a monkey, a duck and Elon Musk) each cost around $90 to mint. – The amounts are small against the $3 billion-plus still unlaundered, and the trail stays traceable—it just buys time, a technique Elliptic first saw in the 2025 Bybit theft. North Korea’s hackers have found a novel use for the internet’s favorite joke tokens: laundering a slice of the record $6.4 billion stolen from Binance
According to a report from blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, the launderers are creating their own worthless meme coins and using them to shuffle stolen funds through decentralized exchanges in a way that breaks the direct onchain link between the thief’s wallet and the one collecting the proceeds. The launderers mint a brand-new token, pair it with a real asset like Near or a stablecoin in a liquidity pool, pay stolen funds into the pool through one set of wallets to buy the token, then sell it back through a separate set of wallets to withdraw clean-looking assets. Because the pool sits in the middle, no stolen funds move directly from the buying wallet to the collecting one, and the receiving wallets look like ordinary traders cashing out a meme coin.
Elliptic, in research credited to co-founder Tom Robinson, said the launderers deployed the tactic on Tron and Near, with a close variant on Solana. The clearest example came on Near, where between Nov. 5 and 7 they created at least six home-made tokens, each paired with Near in its own pool. The coins carried the usual meme-coin trappings: cartoon logos of a bow-wearing monkey, a flag-draped duck, a chimpanzee and a fox, one even featuring an “Elon 2028 President” image of Elon Musk, who has no connection to the…