Something like this was inevitable when people accepted being so complicit in crowdsourcing financing heavily biased towards the black market. Presumably the “never-seen-before” laundering patterns were actually the well known crypto money laundering efforts that exist that just trade and launder the pilfered crypto via high speed high frequency trading for "legit" blocks.
World News
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Ask Historians !askhistorians@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
The whole idea of crypto was to cut out the banks. So the idiots holding their assets on an exchange like Binance (or FTX if anyone remembers those thieves) are just that, idiots.
Who would have thought a bunch of neckbeard tech nerds wouldn't be able to reinvent the banking system? It's almost like there's a constant thread in IT of rampant libertarian nonsense from a bunch of predominantly white men high on their own supply.
I say this as someone with over a quarter century in corporate IT. It's gotten better but my god the delusional level of tech evangalism from all angles is almost non-stop. The current flavour is AI but previously it was RP and before that it was block chain and before that it was noSQL.
Everything amounts to some mouth breather going "I can make it better than the tried and true system that has existed for decades or centuries"
Fucking hubris man. Constantly looking for problems for their "solutions"
I do at least get the idea of very temporarily passing the money through a currency exchange. But not it sitting long enough and trusted enough for hackers to steam $6B of it. Why in the world would anyone do that
Because they're speculating and have open orders.
“This is almost certainly the largest theft of any kind in history,” said Tom Robinson, chief scientist at crypto consultancy Elliptic.
If it's North Korea, and if they get to make use of it, it'd be over 1/6th of their GDP, which is pretty bonkers.
There was that massive bank fraud case in Moldova a few years back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Moldovan_bank_fraud_scandal
In 2014, $1 billion disappeared from three Moldovan banks: Banca de Economii, Unibank and Banca Socială.[3] This bank fraud was a coordinated effort involving all three banks working together to extract as much loan finance as possible from the banks without any obvious business rationale. Ilan Șor, a Moldovan businessman, together with Vladimir Plahotniuc and Serghei Iaralov "masterminded" the scam. Șor was chairman of the board at Banca de Economii (Savings Bank, BEM) up to 28 November 2014.[4]
Funds worth $1 billion were transferred to the United Kingdom and Hong Kong shell companies used to conceal the real owners of assets,[3][5] then deposited into Latvian bank accounts under the names of various foreigners.
The total loss from the scheme was equivalent to 12% of Moldova's GDP.[6]
A carousel borrowing scheme was applied, loans at one bank were paid off with loans from another. The massive expansion of bank lending was funded with heavy borrowing from Russian companies.
That'd be a larger relative impact than the bank fraud was on Moldova (albeit on the receiving side, not the stolen-from side).
If it's North Korea, and if they get to make use of it, it'd be over 1/6th of their GDP, which is pretty bonkers.
Kind of amazing when you put it into prospective. What is scarier is that much suddenly cash flow can help them purchase 'stuff' for 'defense'
Good for them tbh
Anyone still into crypto in 2026 deserves it ¯\(ツ)/¯
Anyone keeping their money in exchanges is a moron. But with that said, I keep a decent amount of money in a few monero wallets since I use monero to pay for mullvad because there are laws being written in my state which may make vpns illegal in the future as part of age assurance laws.
And that's fair, I think. I've considered keeping some money in Monero wallets in case I need to buy grey market HRT.
What gets me, is people dumping their entire savings into exchanges and essentially speculating on a highly volatile thing like cryptocurrency.
I would generalize this to any year really.
I don't believe ANYTHING our government says. How do we know trumPedo didn't give NK what they need so they could steal it and split it with him?
Agreed. I'm extremely skeptical this was a "hack" and more like a laundering-scheme. What was offered in return, I wonder.
Remember too that this is the company whose CEO Trump pardoned as the article notes:
The company was founded by the Chinese-born entrepreneur Changpeng Zhao, now a Canadian and United Arab Emirates citizen, who was jailed for four months in 2024 after pleading guilty to money laundering violations. Donald Trump pardoned him in 2025.
They're going to cover $6.3b? They have enough cash or cryptocurrency on hand for that?
Also, what is NK even planning on doing with it? You can't eat it. Russia wants you to use rubles, China wants you to use RMB. If you trade it for regular currency, you'll be devaluing it. Is there some international black market that will take it?
If you stole it it’s not like devaluing it means much to you lol
Half of that was in stablecoins that were frozen, so they 'only' need to recover around 3b.
Binance, which allows users to buy, sell and trade digital assets, has 335 million registered users globally and had about $162.8bn in assets under custody as of the exchange’s 2025 annual report.
"Under custody" doesn't mean unrestricted and capable of being transferred freely, or even ownership. The owner of a valet parking garage might have millions of dollars worth of cars inside, but he can't just start using that value to pay off his debts, even if he does have the keys to the cars inside.
Fair, but this wouldn't be the first time depositors took a haircut to cover an exchange, and losing 4% of one's money is already a daily occurrence in crypto.
Is this the final rug pull, stay tuned...got anymore NFT's?
so their going to feed their population with the money right?
North Korea is actually going through an economic boom right now, interestingly. And that new money flowing into the country is being put, in large part to the 20×10 policy, meant to develop regions outside Pyongyang over the next 10 years.
So, while North Korea has a litany of problems, Kim Jong Un sitting on all that money like Smaug isn't necessarily one of them. They are doing stuff with it.
No, they're going to use it to buy parts for weapons and other sanctioned stuff. It's already dark web currency.
Based + Juchepilled
Money is made up. It's only a problem when capitalism dictates who dies and who gets to eat. Either overthrow the gov and destroy capitalism or stop complaining about it when it works as intended.
Money is made up
It is. I took me a while to realize this. 115 grains
It appears capitalism has decided that North Koreans get to eat today.
Does this mean monero will be going up? Should I buy some monero?
No. Historically crypto prices go down after a major hack. The hackers are selling right now, but Binance will buy slowly.
So buy monero now is what you're saying
Isn't it just safe to assume that anyone investing in crypto in 2026 that isn't laundering money, or up to some other criminal activity is about to lose their investment anyway. This is just stealing from other criminals.