The U.S.says two Chinese nationals are responsible for laundering nearly $100 million on behalf of North Korea. Court filings detail Pyongyang's practice of using hackersto conduct illegal activities and evade sanctions.
As the indictment states, the two Chinese hackers laundered large sums of money in cryptocurrency, which had been stolen by malicious actors in South Korea, to avoid detection by US police.
In a related complaint announced Monday, Justice Department lawyers said they had seized some of the approximately $250 million that North Korean hackers stole from a fictitious transaction in 2018.
This money was then laundered through hundreds of automated transactions, designed to prevent detection by authorities.
As has been discovered, some of this money is being used by North Korea to create infrastructure that the country exploits to carry out cyber attacks.
The same hackers are also linked to an attack that took place in November 2019 on a virtual exchange that brought in more than $48 million in cryptocurrency.
The United Nations has imposed sanctions on North Korea since 2006, in an effort to stop funding for Pyongyang's nuclear programs.
North Korea has managed to raise around $2 billion to fund weapons of mass destruction programs by using widespread and increasingly sophisticated attacks to steal money from banks and exchanges,
United Nations experts said North Korea's attacks on cryptocurrency transactions allowed it to "generate income in ways that are harder to trace and subject to less government oversight and regulation than the traditional banking sector.".
North Korea denied these allegations, saying they are fake news aimed at tarnishing the country's image.
