The CEO of Cryptocurrency Exchange Bybit, Ben Zhou, said that 27.95% of the funds lost in the exponance of $ 1.4 billion designed by the Lázaro group of North Korea have obscured or have become impossible to track.
“The total pirated funds of USD 1.4bn around 500k ETH. 68.57% remains traceable, 27.59% have obscured, 3.84% have frozen. The funds impossible to track flow mainly to mixers that through bridges to P2P and OTC platforms,” Zhou said in an executive summary published on Monday.
Non -traceable funds moved to mixers before being transferred through bridges to P2P (pairs of equal) and OTC (free sale), explained the publication, mentioning the use of Wasabi, a cryptographic mixer, to wash a certain amount of BTC, after which a portion of these funds entered other mixers, including railways, torch and torch Cryptomixer.
The malicious entity then executed multiple cross -chain exchanges through Thorchain, Exch, Lombard, Lifi, Stargate and Sunswap, with the final stage that implies the conversion of these illicit funds into more liquid assets.
The Lázaro Group linked to North Korea pirate bybit in February, draining 500,000 ether (eth) taking “control of the specific eth eth wallet and transferring all the ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address.”
Forensic reveals that from the pirate funds, a total of 432,748 ETH, which represents 84.45%, has been transferred from ether to Bitcoin through Thorchain. In particular, 67.25% of these funds, which amount to 342,975 ETH (around $ 960.33 million), have become 10,003 BTC and distributed in 35,772 wallets with an average of 0.28 BTC per wallet.
In addition, 1.17% of the funds, or 5.991 ETH (approximately $ 16.77 million), remains in the Ethereum block chain, hidden in 12,490 wallets.
Finally, the Bounty de Lazarus initiative has received 5,443 rewards reports in two months, of which 70 have been considered valid. Zhou said the exchange needs “more rewards hunters who can decode mixers, since we need a lot of help there in the future.”
