Following an investigation by blockchain sleuth ZachXBT, four stablecoin issuers — Paxos, Tether, Techteryx, and Circle — froze nearly $5 million in stablecoins held in two wallets associated with the notorious North Korean government-backed Lazarus hacking group. ZachXBT also pointed out that Circle froze the tokens longer than the other issuers, a total of 4.5 months.

The freezing of these funds by stablecoin issuers has resulted in the cryptocurrency's most notorious hacking group losing access to nearly $5 million in stablecoins stored in two wallets. An investigation led by blockchain sleuth ZachXBT identified and tracked the funds.

With the assistance of employees from Metamask, Binance, TRM Labs, and Five I's LLC, ZachXBT discovered in a preliminary investigation that the North Korean government-backed Lazarus Group had laundered over $200 million worth of cryptocurrency into fiat currency over a three-year period. These funds were stolen in 25 separate attacks across multiple blockchains, after which the hackers used multiple accounts in peer-to-peer markets to cash out the funds.

This investigation led to the issuers of stablecoins USDT (Tether), USDC (Circle), TUSD (Techteryx), and BUSD (Paxos) freezing nearly $5 million in stablecoins held in two wallets. The two wallets also contained $720,000 worth of DAI stablecoin and approximately $313,000 worth of Ethereum, which were not frozen.