The US Department of Justice racked up several convictions in its pursuit of domestic employees in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea schemes to pocket large amounts of cryptocurrency, and also seized assets from cyber heists targeting crypto platforms, the department said in a statement on Friday.
The five guilty pleas announced by the Justice Department related to people who helped North Korea secure jobs in the United States for fraudulent information technology workers, obtained stolen American identities for the workers and helped mask their geographic origin while IT employees withdrew paychecks from dozens of American companies. Investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation “continue to expose the North Korean government’s relentless campaign to evade U.S. sanctions and generate millions of dollars to fund its authoritarian regime and weapons programs,” Deputy Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s counterintelligence division said in a statement. He urged companies to improve vetting of remote workers to counter this trend.
Authorities have also been steadily seizing crypto assets from bad actors around the world, marking another $15 million worth of Tether USDT from North Korean sources on Friday. The assets are associated with cyber heists linked to the group known as Advanced Persistent Threat 38, which is allegedly connected to the North Korean military.Read more: North Korean hackers were behind the biggest cryptocurrency “theft of all time”
Earlier this week, the Justice Department and other federal agencies also announced a Scam Hub Strike Force to target hubs of so-called hog slaughter scams, typically clustered in Southeast Asia and run by Chinese criminal organizations. Authorities said they had seized another $80 million in stolen funds in that search. The victims will be compensated with the money seized, according to the Department of Justice.
What remains unclear 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 been working to establish the so-called strategic bitcoin reserve to hold all BTC seized during criminal and civil seizures, and Trump also ordered the creation of a separate reserve to hold all other digital assets. However, officials working on those reserves have suggested that congressional action may be necessary to formally institute the plan.
Read More: No Bitcoin Reserve Plans in US as White House Touts Crypto Report
