The Dark Side of Cryptocurrencies. Web3 watchdog ZachXBT specializes in denouncing scammers and other scammers that abound in our ecosystem, but isn’t afraid to take on the big fish like pirates in Pyongyang’s pay: the Lazarus Group . ZachXBT recently shared some details that put him back on the trail of North Korean hackers, and it all started with a cry for help from someone in his community.
ZachXBT subscriber condemns practices of Chinese trader…
One of his hundreds of thousands followers contacted ZachXBT to explain to him that he had just been blocked by the platform (whose name has been withheld) after making a P2P transfer with a certain Yicong Wangapparently a Chinese national. After this operation, he received word that he had broken the law by helping the Lazarus group launder money.
The victim who claims to be innocent will immediately send as much information as possible to ZachXBT to show their good faith and try to get out of this rather unpleasant situation. But the story doesn’t end there because a few months later this same person receives a call for help from one of his friends he just contacted directly Yicong Wang for the same type of transfer, but this time for approximately $1.5 million.
The two friends refuse the operation and then turn to their hero 3.0 again and tell him more information, including the nicknames used by the famous Yicong Wang, but especially the TRON network addresses from WeChat exchanges.
…who would surely launder millions of dollars on behalf of North Korean pirates
With this data ZachXBT will follow the money trail and monitor the operations performed on these addresses and it won’t take long to find that at least one of them is connected to numerous recent hacks, such as the Alex Lab hack in May 2024 for $4.5 million.
It will eventually connect with more 25 groups related to Lazarus who would cook more than 17 million dollars through these different addresses! Eventually, Yicong traces Wang to several platforms he was banned from, such as Paxfull or Noones, where he tried to register under many different pseudonyms. ZachXBT ends his message thread with a wish: “I hope that sometime in the future, Yicong Wang will be held accountable for his actions”.
Unfortunately, it is not certain that international justice will be able to get their hands on this figure, but all the police and cybercrime forces in the world are still trying to block the funds associated with Lazarus as soon as possible. Yes, crypto is used by North Korean criminals, but at least it offers investigators the ability to freeze funds, which good old cash doesn’t.