The Launderers' Memecoin Laundromat

The real news

The story, straight

A meme coin is a digital token usually built around a joke. North Korea's launderers found another use: disposable containers for stolen money.

Apparently even financial crime needs a cute logo now.

In its 9 November report, blockchain analysis firm Elliptic identified at least 6 tokens created on NEAR, a network that records crypto transactions, between 5 and 7 November. Its analysis found roughly $430,000 in stolen Binance funds passed through those tokens.

That is the amount moved through this batch, not the total Binance theft.

The mechanism uses a trading pool: a shared reserve where people swap different crypto assets. Wallets holding stolen funds buy the homemade token through the pool; other wallets sell the token into it and collect valuable assets.

The pool sits between the wallets, making the recipients look like ordinary traders.

Except the crowd was mostly the same operation wearing different hats. Elliptic found the network made every sale across the 6 tokens and every purchase across 5.

The exception was a handful of small outside purchases of FUK. This was not a mass rug pull of ordinary buyers.

The punchline: the washing machine keeps receipts. Elliptic says the transactions remain publicly traceable; the extra steps slow investigators rather than erase the trail.

The useful takeaway is not to assume money leaving a trading pool is clean. Elliptic offers a free Binance hack blocklist for screening connected wallets:

https://www.elliptic.co/binance-hack-2026-blocklist/

Repost this: apparently the evidence needs a spin cycle too.

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