Topic
The use of cryptocurrency to move, obscure, or cash out proceeds from cybercrime, fraud, or other illicit activity.
Japanese police arrested six people, including a staffing firm's president, over alleged crypto laundering of about 91 million yen of scam money. Police allege the firm took about 1% to convert victims' money, so the case is built on the conversion service.
Reality
Investigator ZachXBT posed as a paying client of a Chinese laundering network and traced more than $12 million of North Korea's stolen Bybit funds. The trace covers under 1% of the roughly $1.5 billion taken, so the broker proved reachable even as recovery stayed small.
Reality
Manhattan federal jurors convicted Jonathan Spalletta of computer fraud and money laundering over the $53.3 million Uranium Finance exploit of 2021. Where the roughly $31 million in crypto seized in February 2025 ends up now turns on restitution and forfeiture rulings still to come.
Perspective Coverage
10 publishersReality
ZachXBT says he fronted $349.7K in USDC to pose as a client of the Chinese syndicate laundering North Korea's Bybit haul. The only recovery on record, a 442K USDT freeze by Tether, covers at most 3.7% of the $12M+ cluster he says the sting exposed.
Perspective Coverage
8 publishersReality
Swap protocols and wallets collected $761,725 in fees moving funds from the $387.5 million Bitget hack, researcher Andrey Sergeenkov found. Part of $259,718 in linked THORChain affiliate fees reached an OKX-labeled wallet, where deposit records could identify a holder.
Reality
Treasury's OFAC sanctioned 10 people over Ploutus ATM jackpotting, a scheme US officials tie to at least 1,500 attacks and $40.7 million in losses. Treasury calls the thefts a key revenue source for the Venezuelan criminal group Tren de Aragua.
Perspective Coverage
5 publishersReality
NEAR Intents' SHIELD layer refused all but $166,000 of a $50 million-plus attempt by Bitget's hackers. That makes screening policy the clearest difference between NEAR and THORChain. Each protocol carries a different exposure because of it.
Perspective Coverage
4 publishersReality
Suspected North Korean hackers have moved $3.8 million of Bitget's $387.5 million into Zcash's shielded pool, about 1% of the haul. About $24 million of stolen ZEC remains in transparent addresses that exchanges and police can still freeze.
Reality
Crypto hacks drained $766.49 million in September, a 2026 monthly record, and $387.5 million came from one breach of Bitget's hot wallets. After the money returned from the Liquid Network exploit, that one exchange accounts for about 80% of what stayed stolen.
Reality
Wallets tied to the $387.5 million Bitget hack moved 2,746 ZEC, about $3.9 million, into Zcash's Ironwood shielded pool on September 30. The deposit is about 1% of the theft, and across every route tracked so far roughly 13 dollars have gone dark for each dollar frozen.
Reality
Trung Nguyen Van faces a US money-laundering charge over crypto wallets that the DOJ says took in $53 million from fraud between 2018 and 2024. The trail was still good enough to charge him years later, and the department's own figures show the wallets forwarded nearly all of the money.
Reality
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen publicly asked THORChain to refuse service to the wallets that took $387.5 million, after Circle and Tether stopped nearly $318,000. Much of the rest now depends on a no-KYC swap protocol that has declined to block stolen funds in earlier hacks, including its own.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Mining is legal in Mexico; siphoning power from federal infrastructure is not, and the state utility valued all the electricity stolen nationwide in the first seven months of 2024 at 13.8 billion pesos.
Reality
Eighteen defendants are charged over the August 2024 heist, and the alleged ringleader reaches a plea agreement hearing on Tuesday. Prosecutors describe laundering built to hide the money, but one account signup exposed it.
Reality
Malone Lam's plea hearing closes a case that started with a phone call and unravelled over a nightclub tab, at a moment when FBI crypto fraud complaints have risen nearly 50% and the DOJ's crypto unit is gone.
Reality
The AFP says a syndicate planted code in an open-source repository and harvested more than 500,000 credentials, with remediation running into the hundreds of millions, while the charge sheet names no package and no registry.
Reality
An April 2026 indictment over roughly $13 million in laundered Bitcoin and Tether sits alongside a 9 million shekel analytics contract and a court ruling letting Israeli police ask foreign issuers to freeze wallets.
Reality
Police allege a small number of trusted components carried the compromise into more than 1000 organisations, and the charge sheet puts the heaviest sentencing exposure on the money laundering count, well above anything tied to the code itself.
Reality