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Lazarus Group laundered $200M from 25 crypto hacks to fiat

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Re: Lazarus Group laundered $200M from 25 crypto hacks to fiat

#181

Post by qingcharles »

gorgoiler wrote: post #73
appendix-rock wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only an American would ever entertain this idea without being at least a bit tongue in cheek about it. The US doesn’t own the Internet.

Out of interest I looked up who controls the DNS root servers: Europe (2): RIPE and Netnod AB. RIPE is Europe’s RIR, run as a conference by European ISPs. Netnod is a Swedish ISP. Asia (1): Project WIDE, part of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. US (9): Verisign, Cogent, NASA, US Department of Defense, US Army, the University of Maryland, ISC (as in the Bind9 people), ICANN itself, and the University of Southern Cal…

It would be very easy to run without DNS. Just have someone bring a decent sized chunk of the world's DNS entries into the country in a diplomatic pouch every month.

Re: Lazarus Group laundered $200M from 25 crypto hacks to fiat

#182

Post by yieldcrv »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #61
yieldcrv wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and when the crypto passes through a government’s address it magically becomes clean :)) so the whole blacklist concept is dumb because the same funds have to be reset, but the old chains of transactions are still being passed around as if its a “gotcha” but theyre really irrelevant quickly and reintegrated back into the economy quickly

I don't see what's dumb about it. It seems like blacklisting is the digital equivalent of "I don't want to do business with criminals" - I wouldn't knowingly buy anything from a thief, or from a store that knows some of its suppliers are thieves. If law enforcement has seized the property and auctioned it, then the criminals aren't profiting, so I don't mind.

The point is that when a government seizes crypto funds and auctions them off again, the funds are clean for legal purposes but transaction history doesn’t change, it just has an additional transaction.

Software that flags aspects of transaction is nullified by the reality that it doesn't actually know that one subsequent transaction cleaned the whole trail. There are hundreds of thousands of governments around the world when factoring in municipal authorities, even governments you don't respect are cleaning funds in the eyes of governments you do respect. In the eyes of the requirements of exchanges that have these automated chain analysis practices. Right now, only a handful of governments do crypto investigations and seizures, but as this increases it only moves towards the nullifying chain analysis, as many funds will be comingled with a flagged transaction but unknown to the software about how these funds have been washed by a nation state’s blessings.

Re: Lazarus Group laundered $200M from 25 crypto hacks to fiat

#184

Post by citizenpaul »

mattmaroon wrote: post #23

Serious question, if the United States decided to unilaterally cut North Korea off from the Internet, how hard would that be to do? Could we just knock out a few cables? North Korea pretty much only uses the Internet for scams Or to make money in violation of sanctions. They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would ne…

N.Korea is a Chinese weapon, unfortunately. To do something like cut off their internet would be considered an attack on China. China is their border where do you think they get connected to the internet.

Re: Lazarus Group laundered $200M from 25 crypto hacks to fiat

#186

Post by churchill »

tazu wrote: post #179
churchill wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not really selling solutions if it still costs them at the end. For the most part, US foreign policy is a net negative for America's pockets and many of their "allies."

There is no cost, overall it all raises US GDP. Military lives are not considered.

Digging a hole and covering it at a cost of $22 trillion will double America's GDP overnight. But it doesn't create value for anyone.

All it does is transfer money to the contractor doing the digging (in America's case, the military-industrial complex) while everyone else becomes poorer.

$8 trillion has been spent on the War on Terror so far. Like I said in another comment, that's enough money to build 80 million $100k homes, or reduce America's debt by 25%, or pay off all student loans, or build 400,000 KM of high-speed rail at $20M/km, or give every American taxpayer a one-time check of $48k, etc.

Every bomb dropped on Afghanistan or Iraq was money diverted from something else useful the US could have done.

Re: Lazarus Group laundered $200M from 25 crypto hacks to fiat

#187

Post by AnthonyMouse »

walterbell wrote: post #13

US/Canada 2024, $3 billion in fines by US regulators, https://rupakghose.substack.com/p/td-banks-aml-issues-and-fi... > DoJ investigation found.. [banking] business had been used to launder more than $650m between 2016 and 2021 from US fentanyl sales for Chinese crime groups and drug traffickers. Canada 2018, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33918115 > An estimated $5.3 billion of laundered money into B.C. real e…

The problem with "money laundering" is that its theory and its operation are the inverse of one another.

The theory is supposed to be that you make it illegal to conceal the source of money that is the proceeds of a crime, so you can prosecute criminals for money laundering even if you couldn't prove the original crime. Which, to begin with, is pretty sus. Basically an attempt to end run around the government satisfying its burden of proof for the underlying crime.

But that also doesn't work. The criminals just set up a legitimate business as a front, claim the money came from there and the only way to prove otherwise is to uncover the original crime. So in practice money laundering is overwhelmingly charged in one of two cases.

One, they already proved the original crime and tack on a money laundering charge which is pointlessly redundant because those criminals were already caught. Two, you get some innocent people who -- unlike career criminals -- don't understand how money laundering laws work, so even though they were doing nothing wrong, they do something which is technically money laundering (because the rules criminalize innocuous and common behavior), or trigger the false positive AI nonsense, and then get charged with money laundering or booted out of the banking system.

Meanwhile large criminal organizations know how to make their transactions look like innocent transactions and then the government yells at banks for not catching them, even though the banks have no real way to do that because the criminal organizations made their transactions look like innocent transactions.

This is a dumb law that does more harm than good. Just get rid of it and charge the criminals with their actual crimes.

Re: Lazarus Group laundered $200M from 25 crypto hacks to fiat

#188

Post by petre »

mattmaroon wrote: post #23

Serious question, if the United States decided to unilaterally cut North Korea off from the Internet, how hard would that be to do? Could we just knock out a few cables? North Korea pretty much only uses the Internet for scams Or to make money in violation of sanctions. They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would ne…

Sure. As if they couldn't reroute through any other country. They're already cut off by their leadership, except for the state sponsored cybercriminal groups which don't need a NK IP.

Re: Lazarus Group laundered $200M from 25 crypto hacks to fiat

#189

Post by petre »

churchill wrote: post #171
jb1991 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and immigrants flooding Europe You are blaming the US for that?

Yes, for destabilizing Libya and Syria. Those millions of Syrian immigrants that suddenly started flooding Europe had been living contently in their homeland. What changed starting in 2014? Gaddafi was a major force in stemming illegal immigration through the Sahara. What changed in Libya in 2011?

The US hasn't destabilized Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, yet they get migrants from those countries. And Gaddafi also got screwed by Szarkozy and Tony Blair. The US probably had other plans which didn't quite work out as intended.

Re: Lazarus Group laundered $200M from 25 crypto hacks to fiat

#190

Post by notepad0x90 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #117
notepad0x90 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> america is in an active state of war with NK Hypocrisy and delusion are powerful weapons against the uninitiated, but we are initiated, aren’t we notepaf0x90? WW2 never ended and Russia is still at war with Japan as they never signed a peace treaty. https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-japan-peace-treaty-ukraine-in...

Japan and Russia don't have armies ready to kill each other standing by at each others' borders. There is no peace treaty to be signed between NK and SK because the conflict behind the war is still unresolved. They are actively sending spies to sabotage each other. NK built nukes specifically because of this conflict. They didn't build ICBMs for the sake of it, they built it to nuke america because of this active state of war.
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