Stealing $1.5B in crypto is easy, cashing out is the trap

What happened

While the hack itself has been widely covered and analyzed, few have focused on what happened afterward and what became of the stolen funds. To move all that money, hackers needed to rely on an entire network of people willing to handle stolen assets, creating a chain of relationships that someone prepared to spend enough money could infiltrate.

He committed 349,700 USDC (Circle’s dollar-pegged token) and accepted a 5% loss on each completed order while posing as a client of a Chinese laundering network. North Korean hackers stole around $1.5 billion from Bybit in February 2025.

To move all that money, hackers needed to rely on an entire network of people willing to handle stolen […] The post Stealing $1.5B in crypto is easy, cashing out is the trap appeared first on CryptoSlate . That's what ZachXBT , a pseudonymous blockchain investigator, did.