North Korean hacker group, Lazarus Group, was seen sending Bitcoin to multiple unknown addresses, bringing their total holdings down to 13,441 BTC, according to on-chain data.
According to data from Arkham Intelligence, the North Korean hacker group’s Bitcoin (BTC) holdings are now worth around $1.15 billion after the mass transfers. On March 20 at around 9:18 AM UTC, the wallet sent 12.929 BTC or equal to $1.12 million to an unknown wallet address.
Following the 12.929 BTC transfer, the wallet continued to send Bitcoin to four other wallet addresses. Two unknown wallets each received 0.308 BTC, one wallet received around 14.849 BTC, another received 15.684 BTC. In total, the wallet sent out more than 44.07 BTC ($3.76 million) to five different wallet addresses in the past three hours.
The fact that the Lazarus Group is distributing its BTC holdings across multiple wallets, the group may be doing so for laundering purposes to make the funds even more difficult to trace back.
Earlier today, Bybit CEO Ben Zhou claimed that 88.87% of the stolen funds from the exchange is still traceable through on-chain data. According to Zhou, around 86.29% of the stolen funds — or equal to $1.23 billion — has been converted into 12,836 Bitcoin and spread across as many as 9,117 wallets.
Zhou believes the hackers have been using Bitcoin mixers to scramble the transaction history, making the stolen funds even harder to track.
At press time, the wallet labeled “Lazarus Group” by Arkham Intelligence currently holds 13,658 ETH (ETH), valued at around $27 million. The wallet also holds $3.17 million in BNB (BNB), $706,400 in DAI (DAI) and $288,870 in BABYDOGE (BABYDOGE). The rest of its holdings are kept in stablecoins like BUSD (BUSD), USDT (USDT) and USDC (USDC). However, the largest share of its trove is kept in Bitcoin.
The Lazarus Group is a North Korean state-sponsored hacking organization, has been active since at least 2009. Their earliest known operation was called “Operation Troy,” which targeted the South Korean government.
The group’s latest heist was a hack on the Bybit crypto exchange, which led to the platform losing around $1.4 billion. The hack is considered one of the largest crypto hacks ever recorded.
