North Korean hackers launder stolen billions by minting fake Elon Musk meme coins

A new report from blockchain analytics firm Elliptic reveals that North Korean hackers are using homemade meme coins, including one featuring an 'Elon 2028 President' image, to launder a portion of the record $6.4 billion stolen from Binance. The criminals mint their own worthless tokens like FUK and SINU, pair them with real assets on decentralized exchanges like Near and Tron, and use liquidity pools to shuffle stolen funds, breaking the direct on-chain link between the thief's wallet and the final recipient.

While the amounts laundered through this specific method are relatively small compared to the over $3 billion still unwashed, the technique represents a novel evolution in crypto money laundering that buys time and creates plausible deniability. The trail remains traceable by forensic firms, but this tactic—first observed in the 2025 Bybit theft—shows how launderers are adapting to leverage the very infrastructure of decentralized finance designed for transparency to obscure their movements.