Inside the international sting operation to catch North Korean crypto hackers | CNN Politics
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Watch Alex Marquardt’s report on the sting operation on Erin Burnett OutFront on Monday, April 10, at 7 p.m. ET. CNN — A team of South Korean spies and American private investigators quietly gathered at the South Korean intelligence service in January, just days after North Korea fired three ballistic missiles into the sea. For months, they’d been tracking $100 million stolen from a California cryptocurrency firm named Harmony, waiting for North Korean hackers to move the stolen crypto into accounts that could eventually be converted to dollars or Chinese yuan, hard currency that could fund the country’s illegal missile program. When the moment came, the spies and sleuths — working out of a government office in a city, Pangyo, known as South Korea’s Silicon Valley — would have only a few minutes to help seize the money before it could be laundered to safety through a s