Further Sanctions Against North Korea’s Lazarus Group
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Today the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned three Ethereum addresses which are being used to launder funds stolen from Ronin in March by North Korea’s Lazarus group. This follows last week's action to sanction the address first used to receive these stolen funds.
Initially, Lazarus attempted to launder the stolen ETH through centralised exchanges including Binance, which announced today that it had recovered $5.8 million. However, more recently Lazarus had been splitting up the funds and laundering this using Tornado Cash, a decentralized mixer on the Ethereum blockchain. Recently, Tornado Cash announced that they would block funds from OFAC sanctioned addresses, stating “maintaining financial privacy is essential to preserving our freedom, however, it should not come at the cost of non-compliance”. It is possible that this is what prompted OFAC to sanction these most recent addresses, before the group could send any more of these funds through …
Initially, Lazarus attempted to launder the stolen ETH through centralised exchanges including Binance, which announced today that it had recovered $5.8 million. However, more recently Lazarus had been splitting up the funds and laundering this using Tornado Cash, a decentralized mixer on the Ethereum blockchain. Recently, Tornado Cash announced that they would block funds from OFAC sanctioned addresses, stating “maintaining financial privacy is essential to preserving our freedom, however, it should not come at the cost of non-compliance”. It is possible that this is what prompted OFAC to sanction these most recent addresses, before the group could send any more of these funds through …