American authorities have obtained court authorisation to seize more than US$1.2 billion of the cryptocurrency stolen from the exchange Binance last month — the first substantial recovery in what is described as the largest crypto theft on record.
The US Justice Department announced the authorisation on Thursday, Hiru News reported early on Saturday.
What was taken
Binance lost assets worth more than $6.3 billion in the October breach, an amount that places it among the largest thefts of any kind in recorded history. The theft itself was executed in under 20 minutes.
US authorities attribute it to TraderTraitor, a hacking group linked to North Korea — the same group blamed for the $1.5 billion theft from the Bybit exchange last year, which this one surpasses.
What has been recovered
Of the stolen funds, more than $2.7 billion has so far been frozen through combined US government and private-sector action. The court authorisation covers more than $1.2 billion of that total.
A seizure of this kind is not the end of the matter. In such cases an application is made to the court, and a judge then determines who holds lawful title to the assets — so the funds are not immediately returned to anyone.
Binance has separately said it has completed the work of covering the assets affected by the security incident.
Context from earlier reporting
This desk reported the heist itself on 31 October, when the FBI attributed it to North Korea, and the resumption of withdrawals days later. North Korea has publicly denied the US attribution.
A note on sourcing
This article rests on a single verified source. A search of the newsrooms this desk treats as verified — including Al Jazeera, CNN, Daily Mirror and EconomyNext — found extensive coverage of the October heist and of North Korea’s denial, but no filing from any of them on this week’s seizure authorisation. The underlying document is a US Justice Department announcement, which this desk was unable to retrieve directly.
The figures above should therefore be read as Hiru News’s account of the Justice Department’s statement, not as independently corroborated reporting.
Not reported
The filing does not name the court or the prosecutors involved, does not say what share of the $6.3 billion remains unrecovered or unfrozen, does not explain how the seized assets were traced, and gives no timetable for the ownership ruling. It does not say whether any individual has been charged.
