The overwhelming majority of stolen cryptocurrency today is being used to fund the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Crypto theft is rampant because it’s easy. The system, bereft of institutional safeguards by design, requires that individual participants secure their own assets — a task for which most are not particularly well-suited. The result: entire national GDPs worth of financial theft every year. Even just in 2025, in the US alone, including only known and reported cases, the FBI found that Americans lost more than $11 billion in crypto-focused scams run by cybercriminals such as gangsters in Southeast Asia. The biggest winner of all, though, is the DPRK. According to data from TRM Labs, North Korean hackers have been responsible for at least around a third of all financial losses from cryptocurrency in six out of the past nine years.

Full report : North Korean threat actors are pulling off historic cryptocurrency heists on a yearly, sometimes weekly basis now. AI might be helping them.