North Korea is minting meme coins to launder the Binance hack

Key Points:

• North Korean launderers are using newly created worthless meme tokens on blockchains like Tron, NEAR, and Solana to move stolen cryptoassets through decentralized exchange liquidity pools, disguising the flow of stolen funds without direct wallet-to-wallet transfers.
• This laundering technique involves creating a token, pairing it with a real asset in a liquidity pool, buying the token with stolen funds, and then selling it back to withdraw clean assets, effectively slowing down investigators rather than hiding the funds entirely.
• In the $6.4 billion Binance hack, around 117,000 NEAR (approximately $430,000) was laundered through six home-made meme tokens on NEAR, each created and discarded quickly, demonstrating the method's low cost and potential for handling larger sums.
• The tokens show clear signs of laundering: they were traded exclusively within the laundering network, launched and abandoned rapidly, and funded sequentially by proceeds from previous tokens, indicating deliberate use for money laundering rather than legitimate trading.
• Compliance teams are advised not to assume funds arriving from liquidity pools are clean, especially when involving newly created tokens, and to scrutinize token creation dates, trading patterns, wallet funding, and to utilize updated blocklists and continuous monitoring to detect laundering activity.