The hackers behind last month’s historic heist at Binance are using memecoins to launder some of the proceeds.

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The hackers, believed to have ties to North Korea, have so far laundered roughly $430,000 of stolen crypto, a fraction of the $6.3 billion stolen, blockchain company Elliptic said in a blog post Monday (Nov. 9).

“Most people think of meme tokens as joke coins whose prices rise and fall on hype,” wrote Tom Robinson, Elliptic co-founder and chief scientist. “North Korea’s launderers have found a different use for them, creating tokens that nobody else wants to buy and using them to disguise the movement of stolen funds.”

The blog post noted that while amounts involved are small so far, the technique costs little to run and could carry much greater sums. The trail can still be followed on-chain, Robinson wrote. The technique slows investigators rather than concealing the funds, and each token is cheap enough to discard.

“Meme coins are launched and traded in their thousands, and most fade within days, so one more short-lived token with a cartoon logo attracts little attention,” Robinson added. “A wallet whose history shows trades in a new meme coin looks like a speculator rather than a launderer, unless someone checks where its money came from.”

5 billion from the crypto exchange Bybit .

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