The U.S. Department of Justice has handed down several convictions in its prosecution of domestic workers in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s schemes to pocket large quantities of cryptocurrencies, and it has also seized assets from cyber heists targeting crypto platforms, the department said in a statement released Friday.
The five guilty pleas announced by the DOJ were related to individuals who helped North Korea find U.S. jobs for fraudulent information technology workers, obtain stolen U.S. identities for the workers, and mask their geographic origins while the IT employees withdrew paychecks from dozens of U.S. companies. Investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation “continue to reveal the North Korean government’s relentless campaign to evade U.S. sanctions and generate millions of dollars to finance its authoritarian rule and weapons programs,” Deputy Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s counterintelligence division said in a statement. He urged companies to improve their monitoring of remote workers to counter this trend.
Authorities have also regularly seized crypto assets from bad actors around the world, marking another $15 million in USDT from Tether on Friday from North Korean sources. The assets are associated with cyber thefts linked to the group known as Advanced Persistent Threat 38, which is believed to be linked to the North Korean military.Read more: North Korean hackers were behind the biggest crypto ‘theft’ of all time
Earlier this week, the Justice Department and other federal agencies also announced the creation of a Scam Center Strike Force to target so-called pig butchering scam centers, typically clustered in Southeast Asia and run by Chinese criminal organizations. Authorities said they seized an additional $80 million in stolen funds in connection with that pursuit. The victims will be compensated with the money seized, according to the DOJ.
What is not yet clear is how much of these seized crypto funds will end up in the reserves that President Donald Trump has sought to establish as a long-term investment for the US government. His administration has worked to create a so-called Bitcoin strategic reserve to hold all BTC seized in criminal and civil forfeitures, and Trump has also ordered the creation of a separate reserve to hold all other digital assets. However, officials working on these reservations have suggested that congressional action may be necessary to officially institute this plan.
Read more: No Bitcoin Reserve Plans in US as White House Touts Crypto Report
