Stablecoin Issuer Freezes $5 Million Worth of ZachXBT’s Stablecoins Linked to Lazarus Group

According to Mars Finance, following an investigation by blockchain detective ZachXBT, four stablecoin issuers - Paxos, Tether, Techteryx and Circle - froze nearly $5 million in stablecoins in two wallet addresses associated with the notorious North Korean government-backed Lazarus hacker group. ZachXBT also pointed out that Circle froze tokens longer than other issuers, a total of 4.5 months. After the stablecoin issuers froze these funds, the most notorious hacker group in cryptocurrency lost access to nearly $5 million worth of stablecoins stored in two wallets, and the investigation led by blockchain detective ZachXBT identified and tracked these funds.

ZachXBT, with the assistance of Metamask, Binance, TRM Labs, and Five I's LLC employees, discovered in its initial investigation that the North Korean government-backed Lazarus Group laundered more than $200 million in cryptocurrency into fiat currency over a three-year period. The funds were stolen in 25 separate attacks on multiple different blockchains, and the hackers then used multiple accounts in peer-to-peer markets to cash out the funds.

The investigation led the issuers of stablecoins USDT (Tether), USDC (Circle), TUSD (Techteryx), and BUSD (Paxos) to freeze nearly $5 million in stablecoins in two wallets. The two wallets also contained $720,000 worth of DAI stablecoins and about $313,000 worth of Ethereum, none of which were frozen.