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North Korea Used Stolen Crypto to Fund Missile Program: Report

The estimate of $50 million is significantly lower than the $400 million identified by Chainalysis in a report released in January.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un  (Wikimedia)

North Korea used stolen crypto funds to help fund its missile development program, Reuters said, citing a report prepared for the United Nations.

  • "According to a member state, DPRK cyberactors stole more than $50 million between 2020 and mid-2021 from at least three cryptocurrency exchanges in North America, Europe and Asia," the report says, using the initials of the country's formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
  • The confidential report on the nuclear and ballistic missile program is prepared annually and was presented to the U.N. Security Council's North Korea sanctions committee on Friday.
  • The estimate is significantly lower than the $400 million identified by Chainalysis in a report released January. It's also less than the $300 million found in last year's U.N. report.
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Sheldon Reback

Sheldon Reback is CoinDesk editorial's Regional Head of Europe. Before joining the company, he spent 26 years as an editor at Bloomberg News, where he worked on beats as diverse as stock markets and the retail industry as well as covering the dot-com bubble of 2000-2002. He managed the Bloomberg Terminal's main news page and also worked on a global project to produce short, chart-based stories across the newsroom. He previously worked as a journalist for a number of technology magazines in Hong Kong. Sheldon has a degree in industrial chemistry and an MBA. He owns ether and bitcoin below CoinDesk's notifiable limit.

Sheldon Reback