According to Reuters, United Nations sanctions monitors revealed that North Korea laundered nearly $150 million in stolen cryptocurrencies through Tornado Cash in March.
The cybercriminals deposited the funds, stolen from the HTX crypto exchange, onto the privacy-preserving platform to evade law enforcement detection.
Tornado Cash, known as a coin mixer, obscures cryptocurrency movements by breaking the on-chain link between transaction source and recipient wallet address.
The U.N. monitors discovered the money laundering scheme amid an investigation into North Korea-linked cyber thefts, which involved 97 attacks on crypto exchanges totaling $3.6 billion between 2017 and 2024.
Despite years of sanctions on North Korea, the U.N. has not imposed new measures since 2017 due to concerns about their impact on civilians.
Tornado Cash has faced criticism for enabling criminal money laundering, leading to legal consequences for its co-founder, Alexey Pertsev, who recently received a prison sentence in the Netherlands for money laundering.
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