Despite being unable to feed its people, North Korea has found innovative ways to fund its missiles programmes. A more novel revenue stream is stolen cryptocurrency
of celebration are as close to literally burning money as fireworks and missile tests. And for North Korea, a great fan of both, the more it burns the better. It launched more than 95in 2022, a new record. And it loves above all to splurge on the biggest, showiest rockets, like the intercontinental ballistic missile it fired eastwards into the sea on February 18th.
But as with all heists, the robbery is just the first step. To launder their loot North Korean hackers employ all sorts of tricks, including splitting up the money, moving it between different crypto wallets, converting it into different coins and putting it through mixers—large digital pools where crypto owners can deposit funds to obscure their origins.
America has blacklisted crypto wallets associated with North Korean hackers. In May it targeted Blender.io, a mixer used in the Axie Infinity hack. In September American investigators recovered $30m of cryptocurrency stolen in that hack. Given aof cryptocurrency after the heist, that represented about 10% of the total. On February 16th Norwegian authorities seized another $5.8m.
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