North Korea utilized the Tornado Cash platform to launder an estimated $147.5 million in stolen cryptocurrency.

United Nations sanctions monitors have revealed North Korea's involvement in laundering $147.5 million in stolen cryptocurrency from an exchange. According to a Reuters report, the perpetrators allegedly laundered the stolen crypto through the Tornado Cash crypto platform in March.The international body's sanction monitors submitted a confidential document to the U.N. Security Council sanctions committee on Friday, detailing their investigation into 97 cyberattacks on crypto firms attributed to North Korean suspects over the past seven years, with an estimated value of $3.6 billion.Additionally, this year alone, North Korea is suspected of being behind 11 cryptocurrency thefts valued at $54.7 million. The document suggests that these thefts may have been carried out by inadvertently hired IT workers in small crypto-related companies.One of the major attacks involved the theft of $147.5 million worth of cryptocurrency from the HTX crypto exchange in 2023, which was subsequently laundered in March.Blockchain forensics firm Elliptic confirmed that North Korea's Lazarus group was involved in stealing $112.5 million in cryptocurrency from HTX exchange and its cross-chain bridge – HECO Bridge. Over $100 million from this hack has been laundered through Tornado Cash since March 13, 2024.The US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash on August 8, 2022, accusing it of facilitating the laundering of $7 billion in cryptocurrency since 2019. The platform faced international scrutiny after its developer, Alexey Pertsev, was accused of money laundering and was subsequently detained in the Netherlands in August 2022 following the US government's blacklist of Tornado Cash. On Tuesday, Pertsev was convicted of money laundering by a Dutch judge at the s-Hertogenbosch court.