Kim Yo Jong, a senior official of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party, said the international community should look at who stands to receive the crypto taken from Binance once it is recovered, hinting that Washington could be behind the hack, as Pyongyang dismissed the FBI’s finding that its hackers carried out the theft.
The statement, released Nov. 2 through KCNA, is North Korea’s first comment on the incident, according to South Korean broadcaster SBS. Kim called the U.S. position “an absurd rhetoric and nothing new” and said blaming her country for cyber crimes worldwide was a “grave political provocation.”
She then urged the international community to recall that the Trump administration announced soon after taking office last year that it would seize stolen crypto and keep it as a strategic reserve. “If it carefully examines who will get the large amount of the so-called stolen cryptocurrency when the latter is retrieved, it may get a clue about who is behind the hacking incident,” she said.
The statement offered no evidence for that suggestion and did not mention the onchain tracing by TRM Labs and Chainalysis that preceded the FBI’s alert.
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What the FBI Said
The FBI said in an Oct. 31 alert that North Korea was behind the theft of more than $6 billion from Binance on or about Oct. 29, activity it tracks as TraderTraitor, and that the hackers were converting the stolen assets primarily into ether, as Unchained reported earlier.
Kim also said the U.S. “tried to blame the DPRK” last year for the Bybit hack. The FBI attributed that roughly $1.5 billion theft to North Korea in February 2025, tying it to TraderTraitor.
How the Reserve Works
The executive order Trump signed on March 6, 2025, capitalizes the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve with bitcoin the government has finally forfeited in criminal or civil proceedings or collected as civil penalties. It also lets the attorney general or another agency head return forfeited assets to “identifiable and verifiable victims of crime” instead of holding them. Other forfeited tokens, such as ether, which the FBI says the hackers converted most of the stolen funds into, go to a separate Digital Asset Stockpile.
Kim closed by saying Pyongyang is “closely monitoring” U.S. moves against it and has “issues to reconsider in diverse aspects” without naming them.
Related Listen: Why the White House’s Hack-Back Memo Leaves North Korea Off the List
