North Korea Used 6 Meme Coins to Move $430K in Stolen Crypto

North Korea-linked hackers routed roughly $430,000 in stolen NEAR through six self-created meme coins as part of laundering proceeds tied to the $6.3 billion Binance hack, using the tokens to break the direct on-chain link between the wallet holding the loot and the receiving wallet. The technique, which the article describes as a new use for otherwise worthless meme coins, moves value across intermediary tokens so the origin and destination addresses are not directly connected. The transfers represent a small slice of the massive Binance haul but highlight how attackers are diversifying obfuscation methods beyond mixers and bridges. It matters because chain-analytics firms and exchanges rely on traceable flows to freeze and recover stolen funds, and token-hopping can complicate that attribution. What to watch next is whether investigators can still map the six meme-coin hops back to the original wallets and whether the approach spreads to other North Korean laundering operations.