Binance freezes funds linked to the $49 million Upbit breach.

Around 16:00 UTC on May 13, bot Twitter account Whale Alert warned Binance that roughly 137 ether worth around $27,000 had moved from an address linked to the Upbit hacker group to its wallets. Soon after’s Whale Alert’s warning, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted that the exchange has frozen all the funds that were linked to the Upbit breach and would soon give it to the crypto exchange. Binance responded to the Whale Alert’s warning in just over 30 minutes of time.

Binance had committed to freezing funds stemming from the Upbit hack.

The CEO of one of the world’s leading crypto exchange Binance, Changpeng Zhao, had committed to freezing any funds that would land on the platform stemming from the Upbit hack last year. Hackers were able to get away with $49 million in ether last year. Crypto wallet addresses linked to suspected hackers are now flagged, and exchanges usually freeze any funds stemming from these wallets if they arrive on their servers. This is not the first time Binance froze funds coming from hacks. Earlier, the crypto exchange froze funds linked to the $16 million Cryptopia hack.

Hackers continue to launder funds despite exchanges’ efforts.

Around 3,650 ether worth roughly $725,000 has left the crypto wallet linked to the Upbit hack breach in the past 24 hours, much of it passing quickly through other wallets, likely to try and obfuscate the digital paper trail. According to a report from security firm Uppsala earlier this year highlighted the Upbit hackers might have already laundered as much as $3.2 million worth of ETH via different exchanges. Hackers have used Binance and Bitfinex to launder stolen funds by only sending tiny amounts through each time to avoid any red flags. In November last year, an abnormal transaction on Upbit resulted in a 342,000 ether loss in just a few minutes.