53 Wallets Blacklisted: Treasury Action Exposes Stablecoin’s Role in North Korea’s Schemes
The U.S. Treasury's latest sanctions against North Korean money launderers provide key technical insights into how illicit crypto funds are moved globally. The action blacklisted 53 distinct crypto wallet addresses tied to the accused bankers and companies.
Crucially, the Treasury noted that every single one of these blacklisted wallets contained USDT, the popular stablecoin. This highlights the growing reliance on stablecoins by sanctioned nations and criminal enterprises due to their speed and ease of international transfer, enabling them to clean funds from multi-billion-dollar crypto thefts.
The sanctioned bankers, operating mainly from China and Russia, are integral to North Korea’s sanction evasion efforts. Their role is to use elaborate international methods, often leveraging underground Chinese banking networks, to wash the nearly $3 billion in crypto stolen by Pyongyang's hackers.
This systematic targeting of specific wallet addresses, following a massive $14 billion asset seizure from a linked scam operation last month, signifies the U.S. government's calculated strategy to dismantle the entire interconnected infrastructure—from the hackers to the financial facilitators.
