Blockchain Forensics

eXch (exch.cx) was a no-KYC instant cryptocurrency swap service operating from 2014 until its forced shutdown in May 2025. Registered in Belize under the name Private Project Facilitators LTD, the platform processed an estimated $1.9 billion in total volume, deliberately advertising its absence of anti-money laundering controls on criminal underground forums. German federal law enforcement seized approximately $38 million in cryptocurrency assets and 8 terabytes of data from the platform in April 2025, following evidence linking eXch to laundering roughly $200 million of funds stolen in the $1.46 billion Bybit hack carried out by North Korea's Lazarus Group.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), operating primarily through state-sponsored hacking units designated as the Lazarus Group, TraderTraitor, and APT38, has stolen an estimated $6.75 billion in cryptocurrency since 2016 across dozens of major exploits. These operations are attributed by the FBI, OFAC, CISA, and allied governments to North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau and are conducted to fund the regime's weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs in circumvention of international sanctions. DPRK-linked hackers are responsible for the largest single crypto theft in history — the $1.5 billion Bybit hack in February 2025 — and continue to operate at unprecedented scale and sophistication.

A fraudulent mobile application impersonating Hyperliquid, the decentralized perpetuals exchange, was identified on the Google Play Store in November 2025 by on-chain investigator ZachXBT. The app, published under the developer name 'Tvtion Inc.', replicated Hyperliquid's branding and interface to harvest users' seed phrases, transmitting them to an external server. An Ethereum address linked to the operation has been associated with thefts exceeding $281,000; Hyperliquid has never released an official mobile application, making any such listing inherently fraudulent.

Inferno Drainer is a scam-as-a-service (drainer-as-a-service) platform that provided phishing infrastructure and malicious wallet-draining scripts to criminal affiliates in exchange for a percentage of stolen funds. Active from November 2022 through at least early 2025, it is attributed to stealing over $80 million from approximately 137,000 victims during its initial operational phase, with operators claiming a cumulative total exceeding $250 million across all periods including a covert post-shutdown phase. It operates by luring victims to phishing websites impersonating legitimate crypto brands, tricking users into signing malicious transactions that drain wallets across multiple EVM-compatible blockchains.

The Blockchain Bandit is an unidentified threat actor or group that systematically exploited Ethereum wallets holding cryptographically weak private keys between approximately 2015 and 2018, accumulating more than 45,000 ETH (worth over $54 million at peak 2018 valuations) through a technique researchers later termed 'Ethercombing.' The actor compromised 732 private keys across 49,060 transactions, draining wallets in near-real-time using automated blockchain monitoring. Dormant since 2018, the actor re-emerged in January 2023 and again in December 2024, consolidating approximately 51,000 ETH (valued at roughly $172 million) into a single multisig wallet, as tracked by on-chain investigator ZachXBT.

KelpDAO is a liquid restaking protocol that issues rsETH, launched in late 2023 by the team behind Stader Labs. In April 2026 its LayerZero-based rsETH bridge was exploited for roughly $292 million (116,500 rsETH); LayerZero preliminarily attributed the attack to North Korea's Lazarus Group (TraderTraitor), and TRM Labs also attributes it to a North Korean actor. Kelp and LayerZero publicly dispute responsibility for the bridge configuration, and a DeFi-industry recovery effort (DeFi United) restored rsETH backing within weeks while a legal claim over frozen funds remained unresolved in sources found.

Avalanche C-Chain address 0x327a81d0d128db8886d265be73c9fdda97194f30 was flagged by on-chain investigator ZachXBT in June 2024 as the primary launderer for the BTCTurk exchange hack, having transferred approximately 1.96 million AVAX (valued at ~$54.2 million) to Coinbase, Binance, Gate.io, and THORChain. ZachXBT's timing analysis linked subsequent BTC withdrawals of approximately $45.96 million to the same threat actor, who was also allegedly responsible for a concurrent $2.9 million theft from Sportsbet. The address currently holds negligible funds, consistent with successful laundering of proceeds.

[MERGED] Consolidated into /mixin-network on 2026-10-26. This page's content is preserved in its history.

Thunder Terminal is a Solana-based on-chain trading terminal that suffered a $240,000 exploit on December 27, 2023, when an attacker leveraged compromised MongoDB credentials to steal session tokens and drain 86.5 ETH and 439 SOL from 114 user wallets in under nine minutes. The attacker subsequently routed the stolen ETH through the Railgun privacy protocol and demanded a 50 ETH ransom for deletion of alleged user data, directly contradicting Thunder Terminal's public claim that no user data or private keys were compromised. Thunder Terminal pledged full reimbursement of stolen funds, engaged the FBI, and implemented additional security controls, though no public confirmation of completed reimbursements has been verified.

WazirX is an Indian cryptocurrency exchange, operated by Zanmai Labs Pvt Ltd under Singapore-registered parent Zettai Pte Ltd, that lost approximately $234.9 million in a July 2024 multisig-wallet exploit later attributed by the governments of the United States, Japan and South Korea to North Korea's Lazarus Group. Beyond the hack itself, the exchange carries a long record of own-conduct risk: a disputed Binance ownership relationship that has complicated victim recovery, a public attribution fight with its former custody provider Liminal, repeated Indian Enforcement Directorate FEMA and money-laundering actions since 2021, and a 15-month freeze on user funds that ended only after a Singapore court approved a revised restructuring plan in October 2025. A Supreme Court of India petition seeking a criminal probe of WazirX's founder was dismissed in April 2025 on jurisdictional grounds, leaving most liability questions unresolved.