File photo: Historic view of the Department of Justice building. Photo: U.S. Department of Justice / public domain. Cropped and resized.
The Justice Department said Thursday it has obtained court authorization to seize or restrain more than $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency stolen from Binance, as U.S. authorities and private-sector partners work to block North Korean hackers from moving the money.
The action is part of an effort to recover virtual assets taken from the cryptocurrency exchange on or about October 29. The department attributed that theft of more than $6 billion to members of the North Korean military known to the FBI as TraderTraitor.
U.S. government and private-sector efforts have frozen more than $2.7 billion of the stolen assets so far, according to the department. The more than $1.2 billion covered by court-authorized seizure or restraint is part of that frozen pool, not an additional amount.
The announcement does not mean those funds have been returned to victims. The department said tracing, freezing, seizure and forfeiture work remains underway while the hackers move assets through cryptocurrency bridges, mixers and exchanges.
The FBI is coordinating recovery work with the Secret Service and the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigators. Federal authorities have urged virtual-asset service providers to block transactions involving addresses used to launder the stolen Binance assets.
In a separate action announced in the same release, the department said authorities disrupted cloud infrastructure used in a North Korean social-engineering campaign called FaceStealer. The FBI said that campaign has stolen more than $400 million in cryptocurrency over the past 18 months and has increasingly targeted people who maintain open-source software.
The FaceStealer campaign uses stolen accounts, prerecorded videos and deepfakes to impersonate trusted contacts in online meetings, the department said. Attackers then claim a technical problem and offer a supposed fix that installs malware on the target’s computer.
That campaign is separate from the Binance theft. Its losses should not be added to or described as part of the October 29 exchange heist.
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