The United States has announced a sanction against two Chinese individuals who were allegedly involved in a crypto money laundering case.
According to the official release on December 18th, the United States is targeting proliferators of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems by imposing sanctions on two individuals and one organization.
The sanctions imposed today are part of a larger effort to stop the DPRK’s money laundering activities, which fund the illegal weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs of the regime.
US Sanctions Two Chinese Individuals
The official release states that Lu Huaying and Zhang Jian are citizens of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) who reside in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). They served as agents to help the DPRK or its proxies with cryptocurrency conversion and money laundering.
The UAE-based front company Green Alpine Trading, LLC is responsible for laundering millions of dollars on behalf of this network and will be sanctioned for the same.
The move coincides with Washington’s efforts to halt funding for North Korea’s ballistic missile and WMD programs. The US has placed several sanctions on the DPRK to make sure that the funding is stopped, even though the country still uses complex criminal schemes, such as the exploitation of digital assets, to fund its ballistic missile and WMD programs.
North Korea’s Intricate Digital Asset Frauds
North Korea has committed a number of scams related to crypto in the past decade. Since 2006, North Korea, formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), has been under U.N. sanctions. In an attempt to cut back on funding for its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, the sanctions have been tightened over time.
The theft of virtual assets and cryptocurrency has allowed the country to use the money for a variety of purposes since it has been subject to ongoing sanctions.
The two main goals of North Korea’s cyber operations are to obtain strategic intelligence and to raise money to support Kim Jong Un’s Byungjin policy initiatives. It is thought that a sizable amount of the pilfered money goes toward the DPRK’s ballistic and nuclear weapons programs.
A complex web of operations has been produced by North Korea’s methodical development of its cyber capabilities as a political tool, especially in the financial, intelligence, and military domains.
With this in mind, new methods are being used by North hackers to commit cryptocurrency scams. Phishing and malware scams have recently been added to the long list of ways that hackers in the DPRK have been stealing cryptocurrency.