The US Justice Department rounded up several convictions in its pursuit of domestic workers in schemes from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to pocket large amounts of cryptocurrency, and it also seized assets from cyber thefts targeting crypto platforms, the department said in a statement Friday.
The five guilty pleas announced by the DOJ were linked to individuals who helped North Korea get American jobs for fraudulent information technology workers, provided stolen American identities to the workers and helped mask their geographic origins as the IT workers pulled paychecks from dozens of American companies. Investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation “continue to reveal the North Korean government’s relentless campaign to circumvent U.S. sanctions and generate millions of dollars to fund its authoritarian regime and weapons programs,” Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s counterintelligence division said in a statement. He called on companies to improve their controls on remote workers to counter this trend.
Authorities have also steadily seized crypto assets from bad actors around the world, marking another $15 million in Tethers USDT from North Korean sources on Friday. The assets are linked to cyber thefts linked to the group known as Advanced Persistent Threat 38, which is allegedly linked to the North Korean military.Read more: North Korean hackers were behind Crypto’s biggest ‘theft ever’
Earlier this week, the DOJ and other federal agencies also announced a Scam Center Strike Force to target the centers of so-called pork butcher scams, typically clustered in Southeast Asia and run by Chinese criminal organizations. Authorities said they had seized an additional $80 million in stolen funds in that pursuit. Victims will be compensated for seized money, according to the DOJ.
What is not yet clear is how much of these seized crypto funds will end up in the reserves that President Donald Trump has sought to establish as a long-term investment for the US government. His administration has been working to build a so-called bitcoin strategic reserve to hold all BTC taken under criminal and civil forfeitures, and Trump also directed the creation of a separate reserve to hold all other digital assets. However, officials working on those reserves have suggested that congressional action may be required to formally enact the plan.
Read more: No US Bitcoin reserve plans as White House calls out crypto report
