North Korea Turns DIY Meme Coins Into a Laundering Pipe for Stolen Binance Crypto, Elliptic Says

North Korea’s state-linked launderers have begun routing stolen Binance crypto through homemade meme coins, with Elliptic tracing about 117,000 NEAR—roughly $430,000—across six tokens they launched. The maneuver accounts for only a small slice of the approximately $6.3 billion stolen from Binance, but it marks a shift toward using self-issued tokens as a laundering pipe. Elliptic’s analysis points to the launderers creating and trading their own meme coins to obscure the origin of funds. The practice matters because it shows how cheap-to-launch tokens can add layers of obfuscation beyond mixers and bridges. Watch for whether more of the Binance haul gets funneled through similar DIY tokens and whether other chains see comparable activity.