Doj

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.

Malone Lam Yu Xuan (born July 19, 2004), a Singaporean national residing in Miami and Los Angeles, is the alleged ringleader of a crypto theft and money laundering enterprise responsible for stealing over $263 million across multiple victims between 2023 and 2025. He was arrested by the FBI on September 18, 2024, and faces RICO conspiracy charges in what prosecutors describe as the first Bitcoin-related RICO prosecution in U.S. history. As of early 2026, he remains in pretrial detention while negotiating a plea deal.

Noones is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency trading platform targeting Africa and the Global South, founded and initially led by Ray Youssef, co-founder of the now-defunct Paxful. In January 2025, the platform suffered an $8 million hot-wallet exploit that was concealed for nearly three weeks before on-chain investigator ZachXBT publicly exposed the breach. Compounding platform risk, Youssef was subsequently indicted by the DOJ in early 2026 on federal AML charges stemming from his leadership of Paxful, and stepped down as Noones CEO shortly thereafter.