Feds Seize $1.2 Billion From Binance Heist
The Justice Department says more than $2.7 billion in stolen crypto is now frozen, and the FBI has taken down the FaceStealer operation behind a separate $400 million theft.
The Justice Department announced the seizure of more than $1.2 billion stolen from Binance and the takedown of North Korea's FaceStealer operation.
The Justice Department said Thursday it's moved to lock down more than $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency stolen from Binance — the largest single seizure yet in the fallout from October's record-breaking exchange hack.
The court-authorized seizure is one piece of a bigger freeze. Between the U.S. government and private-sector partners, more than $2.7 billion of the stolen funds are now frozen — roughly $1.5 billion of it restrained but not yet under court order.
The theft itself, on October 29, took about 20 minutes. More than $6 billion vanished from Binance — the exchange puts the figure at $6.34 billion, and blockchain tracker Elliptic followed $6.43 billion across more than 20,000 wallets. Investigators attribute the heist to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state hacking group. It passed the $1.5 billion Bybit hack as the largest crypto theft on record.
The same announcement took down a second operation. FaceStealer, another North Korean scheme, used fake video calls, deepfakes and hijacked Telegram, LinkedIn, Slack and Discord accounts to steal more than $400 million over 18 months. The FBI seized its cloud infrastructure — and, under a federal warrant, more than 900 secretly recorded webcam videos of its victims.
The FBI published a FLASH alert on November 12. An October 31 alert from the FBI, the Secret Service and IRS Criminal Investigation listed 628 wallet addresses tied to the actors, who work under aliases including Sapphire Sleet, UNC1069, Dangerous Password, CryptoCore, APT38, BlueNoroff and Stardust Chollima.
A. Tysen Duva, the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division, said the assets were frozen “before they got beyond law enforcement reach.” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro pointed to the $1.2 billion seizure in Washington's piece of the case.
What's missing is names. The department hasn't announced charges or identified individual defendants for the October 29 theft. It says it intends to “seize and return” the money — a promise Binance's customers will be measuring in months, not press releases.
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