North Korea Is Minting Its Own Meme Coins to Launder Binance Hack Loot

Elliptic says North Korean launderers created six throwaway meme tokens on NEAR between Nov. 5 and 7, moving about $430,000 of stolen Binance funds through homemade liquidity pools.

North Korean launderers are creating their own worthless meme coins and pushing stolen Binance funds through them so the coins never move directly from one wallet to another, blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said Monday.

Between Nov. 5 and 7, the operators minted at least six new tokens on the NEAR blockchain — named FUK, OLCCL, MEILI, MMLI, DABI and SINU — paired each with NEAR in its own liquidity pool, then bought the tokens with stolen NEAR and sold them back out through a second set of wallets. About 117,000 NEAR, or roughly $430,000, passed through the six tokens, Elliptic wrote .

The trail sits inside the broader laundering of the Oct. 29 Binance theft, which the exchange has put at $6.34 billion and which the FBI has attributed to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group. Elliptic’s wider update now puts roughly 3,000 BTC — about $225 million — in new bitcoin addresses converted from other stolen assets, while about 11.8 million NEAR, or $43.7 million, from the theft has still not moved.

“Most people think of meme tokens as joke coins whose prices rise and fall on hype,” Elliptic co-founder and chief scientist Dr. Tom Robinson wrote. “North Korea’s launderers have found a different use for them.”

The technique is a four-step hop. The North Korea launderers create a token with a public launch tool, open a liquidity pool pairing it with a real asset such as NEAR or a stablecoin, buy the new token with stolen funds from one set of wallets, then sell it back into the same pool from a second set of wallets that collect the real asset.

At no point do the stolen funds transfer directly from a buying wallet to a collecting wallet, because the pool sits in between. To a casual observer, the collecting wallets look like ordinary traders who sold a token at a profit.

Each of the six NEAR tokens cost about 25 NEAR, or around $90, to create. Each was traded heavily within hours using stolen NEAR and then abandoned. None has traded since Nov. 8, and that afternoon the creators of four of them withdrew what liquidity was left. Five of the six token creators were funded by a wallet that had just sold an earlier token, between two and 13 minutes before the next launch, so the tokens form a chain.