DOJ seizes $1.2B of North Korea's stolen Binance crypto

Crypto theft usually ends the same way: hackers move it through enough wallets that it disappears. On Nov. 12, the Justice Department said that's not what happened this time. It won court authorization to seize more than $1.2 billion connected to October's record-breaking $6.3 billion theft from Binance. The same action also shut down infrastructure behind a separate $400 million scheme using deepfake video calls.

The FBI has blamed North Korea's TraderTraitor hacking group for the original Binance theft. North Korea denies it. 'Seize' here is a legal term, not a wire transfer. It means the government has the court's permission to take control of specific crypto wallets tied to the theft. Combined with earlier freezes by Binance and other exchanges, authorities have locked up more than $2.7 billion. That's out of the roughly $6.3 billion stolen. That leaves well over half still missing. Getting any of this money back to the people whose accounts were drained is a separate process. It hasn't finished yet.

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Will North Korea change tactics now that a chunk of its haul got clawed back? Probably not right away. This is one win in a hacking campaign that's stolen billions over a decade. What's more interesting is law enforcement's growing ability to trace and freeze crypto, even after a hack this size. That could slowly change how attractive these heists look to hackers in the first place.