US Justice Department Secures Authority to Restrict More Than $1.2 Billion in Assets From Binance Theft
Key Facts
The US Justice Department said in a statement dated November 12 that a court authorized the forfeiture or restriction of assets worth more than $1.2 billion linked to a theft targeting Binance. The department described the operation as a theft of more than $6 billion, carried out by members of the North Korean military on or around October 29. The FBI calls the group responsible TraderTraitor. The department said US government and private-sector efforts had by then resulted in the freezing of stolen assets worth more than $2.7 billion. The amount covered by the court authorization is included in that total, making the action a step in the process of handling the assets, not an announcement that victims have recovered their money.
The department's assistant attorney general said enforcement teams and their partners moved quickly and efficiently, stopping about half of what he described as a historic breach. The estimate reflects the amount of money authorities say they managed to freeze or restrict compared with the impact of the theft, but it does not change the legal status of each asset. The authorization allows for forfeiture or restriction, while a freeze remains a separate measure from final forfeiture. The department's statement does not confirm that more than $1.2 billion has been finally transferred to government ownership. Nor does it say the funds have been returned to affected users.
The pursuit of the assets remains complex: the Justice Department said TraderTraitor operatives continue to launder money through cryptocurrency bridges, mixing tools and trading platforms. It said efforts to trace, freeze and seize the funds, and then forfeit them finally, are ongoing. The Associated Press reported that the US government typically files a forfeiture claim with a judge, who then determines the rightful claimants to recovered funds. That places the current authorization at a legal stage before decisions on claimants' rights to the funds. The statement gives no deadline for concluding these proceedings.
Estimates of the scale of the Binance incident vary by source. The Associated Press put the theft at about $6.3 billion and described it as the largest cryptocurrency theft in history. Binance, according to the news agency, said it had allocated more than $6.34 billion in company funds to cover the stolen assets and had begun recovering user assets. In another update cited by the agency, the company estimated the incident's total impact at about $6.3 billion and said it had worked with blockchain partners to freeze about $3 billion in affected assets on-chain. Those figures describe the company's estimates and actions, while the Justice Department statement gives a separate tally of government and private-sector freezing efforts. Binance said in its initial update that the attack exploited unauthorized access to an internal wallet-signing service to execute transactions outside the usual withdrawal process.
In a separate action announced the same day, the Justice Department said the North Korea-linked FaceStealer campaign had led to the theft of more than $400 million in cryptocurrency over the last 18 months. According to the department, the campaign lures targets into video meetings, uses fake recordings or clips, and then presents a link or prompt to fix an alleged technical problem. What is presented as a "fix" installs malware on the target's device. The department said the FBI seized more than 900 video clips from FaceStealer victims' cameras under a federal warrant. The campaign is separate from the Binance theft, and its value is not included in the funds targeted by the court authorization related to the platform.
The Justice Department linked cryptocurrency theft to funding for the North Korean government and its illicit weapons program, saying proceeds from the thefts are used to support that program. The characterization came as the department announced actions aimed at disrupting funding sources linked to Pyongyang, alongside steps to trace stolen assets. Its statement did not link the court action to cryptocurrency price movements during the announcement session. The Associated Press had reported in its initial coverage of the incident that Bitcoin fell 3.2% on Thursday evening to below $79,000, but that was a move on an earlier date, not a reaction to the November 12 announcement. EL7 data also cited a separate market story published on November 14 about Bitcoin falling below $65,000 and the cryptocurrency market losing $680 billion in market value; that, too, does not describe the market at the time of the department's announcement.