North Korea allegedly supported two cryptocurrency scams this year

According to a new report by the US-registered security company, Recorded Future, released October 25, the North Korean government has sponsored at least two fraudulent coins.

In the report titled "The patterns of change in Internet use reveal the adaptable and innovative North Korean government elite", the Recorded Future Insikt research group mentions two alleged altcoin scammers related to North Korea.

The first cheating coin allegedly supported by North Korea is called interstellar currency, and was found by the Insikt Group in June 2018. The currency has been renamed several times, with names such as HOLD, HUZU or Stellar. This should not be confused with the XLM token.

According to the report, the HOLD currency was listed and canceled by a series of cryptographic exchanges, ending up defrauding investors in a scam scheme.

The second fraudulent currency denominated marine chain currency was detected in a "pair of Bitcoin forums" in August 2018. The currency, which allegedly allowed the tokenisation of seagoing ships for multiple users and owners, was declared fraudulent by the state of Ontario, Canada.

A large number of users have complained about the loss of tens of thousands of dollars and scams on the website, which has been hosted in four different IP addresses since its registration. Some users pointed out that the marine-chain.io website was a close-up image of another shipowner.io site:

April 2018 marine chain screenshots[.]me and shipowner[.]I. Source: registered future

In previous research, the Insikt group discovered that North Korean leaders were extracting both Bitcoin (BTC) and Monero's privacy-oriented single-seater (XMR), while on a limited or "relatively small" scale.

At the start of this year, Recorded Future published a report examining the potential links of major encryption attacks with North Korea's cybercrime group, Lazarus. Insikt noted the group's potential involvement in the South Korean Bithumb crypt exchange hack, following previous allegations of hacking of the exchange of makeshift items.

Last week, Cointelegraph reported that Lazarus stole $ 571 million in cryptocurrencies from the start of 2017. According to the cyber crime corporation Group-IB, the total amount stolen from online cryptographic exchanges during the period studied between 2017 and 2018 reached $ 882 million.