In such situations, it is shown how much power it has when two crypto exchanges play together instead of competing. Binance and Huobi have announced that they have foiled a money laundering scheme involving assets stolen from the Harmony Horizon Bridge last year. The heist is one of the biggest crypto hacks of 2022.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced in a tweet that hackers tried to launder their money through the Huobi exchange. After Binance noticed this, they contacted Huobi and helped the exchange freeze and recover the digital assets deposited by the hackers.
We detected Harmony One hacker fund movement. They previously tried to launder through Binance and we froze his accounts. This time he used Huobi. We assisted Huobi team to freeze his accounts. Together, 124 BTC have been recovered. CeFi helping to keep DeFi #ROW! ????
— CZ ???? Binance (@cz_binance) January 16, 2023
According to the founder of Binance at the time of the press conference They recovered 124 BTC worth regarding $2.5 million. Huobi consultant Justin Sun later confirmed the news, thanking the exchange’s dedicated team for detecting and preventing money laundering.
“This is an excellent example of how centralized exchanges (CeFi) can work together to keep the crypto community SAFU (Secure Asset Fund for Users). We will remain vigilant in our efforts to protect our users’ funds and promote a safe trading environment” – He told.
The popular crypto detective drew attention to the movement of money
The announcement comes following on-chain crypto detective ZachXBT highlighted on Twitter that North Korea’s Lazarus Group sent 41,000 ETH worth around $64 million over the weekend, and $63.5 million to three exchange addresses. Confirming that the ETH came from the Harmony Horizon Bridge hack, the detective noted that the assets came from the Tornado Cash anonymizing service to Railgun before they went to the exchanges.
Incidentally, this is the second such case that the vigilance of the anonymous crypto-investigator has led the industry to. Twitter with nearly 350,000 followers to the user thanks to, for example, an Ethereum hack was noticed last year, during which 3.3 million dollars were stolen from users. Thanks to Zach, the illegal pump & dump crypto activity of another popular crypto criminal, YouTube star Logan Paul, was also exposed to the public with accurate blockchain network data.
1/2 North Korea’s Lazarus Group had a very busy weekend moving $63.5m (~41000 ETH) from the Harmony bridge hack through Railgun before consolidating funds and depositing on three different exchanges. pic.twitter.com/huDumaJeSh
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) January 15, 2023
“Binance and Huobi seem to have frozen some funds” – written later by ZachXBT following the CZ announcement.
It was the largest seizure of the exchanges since Harmony Horizon Bridge reported that hackers exploited a vulnerability to steal $100 million on June 24, 2022. Launched in October 2020, Harmony Horizon Bridge was one of the first cross-bridge protocols and helped users send devices from one chain to another. Some analysts believe that the hackers may have targeted the login credentials of the company’s employees before installing the programs that initiated the robbery.
Several blockchain analytics providers linked the theft to the Lazarus Group, which is believed to finance North Korea’s ballistic weapons program. The group is also responsible for more than $2 billion in thefts, including a $620 million heist on Ronin Network, the sidechain built for the popular Web3 game Axie Infinity, last March.
The founder of Tron winks at companies in trouble
Justin Sun is reportedly eyeing the assets of Digital Currency Group (DCG), the parent company of troubled cryptobroker Genesis and several other industry firms. According to Archyde.com, the founder of the blockchain network Tron (TRX) and an adviser to the crypto exchange Huobi is willing to allocate up to $1 billion of his personal funds to purchase some assets of DCG “depending on the assessment of the situation”.
