The US government has taken major step to recover money stolen in the largest cryptocurrency theft in history. On November 12, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that a federal court has approved the seizure of more than $1.2 billion in stolen digital funds. This money was taken during a massive cyberattack on the crypto exchange Binance on October 29, 2026, where hackers stole a total of $6.3 billion.
How money was recovered
Getting stolen cryptocurrency back is normally very difficult, but fast teamwork made a huge difference in this case. Right after the hack happened, major digital currency companies like Tether and Circle stepped in to help. They quickly blocked the digital wallets used by the thieves, freezing over $2.7 billion before the criminals could hide or spend it.
The new court order allows law enforcement to officially take control of over $1.2 billion of those frozen funds. Meanwhile, investigators from the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service, and the IRS are still working around the clock to trace the rest of the missing money. The hackers have been trying to cover their tracks by splitting the stolen crypto into thousands of smaller wallets and trading it for Bitcoin and Ether.
For everyday Binance user's the good news is that their personal savings are safe. Binance announced that it used its own emergency funds and company reserves to replace all $6.34 billion in customer losses right away, so users did not have to wait for the police to recover the money.
Who was behind attack
Federal investigators at the FBI linked the October robbery to a well-known North Korean hacking group called TraderTraitor, which is part of the state-backed Lazarus Group. Although North Korean officials have denied taking part in the crime, investigators pieced together exactly how the theft happened.
The hackers tricked a Binance engineer by setting up a fake job interview on LinkedIn. Once they gained access to the engineer's computer, they broke into Binance's internal security systems. From there, it took the thieves only about 20 minutes to drain billions of dollars across ten different digital network.
Alongside the Binance update, U.S. officials also shared that they shut down another North Korean scam called FaceStealer. In that separate scheme, criminals used fake AI video calls to trick people and steal more than $400 million over the past year and a half. Together, these actions show a major push by global authorities and tech companies to stop large-scale cybercrime.
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