The U.S. Treasury is providing a service to increase the anonymity of crypto assets in the case where a group of North Korean hackers launched a cyber attack on an online game network and stole about 80 billion yen worth of crypto assets. We have imposed sanctions on alleged vendors.
On the 6th, the US Treasury announced that it has added sanctions such as asset freezes to the sanctions list by adding a service called "mixing" that enhances the anonymity of crypto assets to the sanctions list.
According to a statement, the service of this company was about 620 million yen, Japanese yen, when a group of hackers who are said to be under the umbrella of North Korea's foreign machine tool launched a cyber attack on the online game network in March. In the case of stealing cryptographic assets worth about 80 billion yen, it was used to clean up some of the cryptographic assets and supported a group of hackers.
The sanctions list released by the Ministry of Finance includes the "address" of cryptocurrency assets managed by "blender", but the address of the vendor is not disclosed, and it is active only online. There may be.
This is the first time that sanctions have been imposed on a provider of "mixing".
"The vendors that provide crypto asset mixing to support illegal transactions are a security threat. We will take countermeasures against the illegal financial activities of North Korea," the Ministry of Finance said in a statement.