COSTLY BREACH

Trump-Pardoned Billionaire’s Empire Hit by Record Heist

Hackers stole $6.3 billion from the crypto platform.

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Cybercriminals have pulled off the largest heist in history against the crypto platform co-founded by Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire pardoned by Donald Trump last year. According to reports, hackers have stolen $6.3 billion in assets from Zhao’s Binance. The cryptocurrency giant said it had begun recovering and freezing some of the assets, but more than half remain stolen. Binance said its systems had been breached through the compromised laptop of a DevOps engineer, but subsequently, other breaches had been found. Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs said North Korean hacking group TraderTraitor was likely behind the theft. Zhao, a Chinese-Canadian, was pardoned by Trump last year after being found guilty of enabling sanctions violations and sentenced to four months in prison. He had stepped down as Binance CEO in 2023. He is among the richest men in the world, with a net worth estimated at $111 billion by Forbes.

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