Binance hack probe freezes about $3B as Secret Service moved in minutes

The Secret Service says it helped freeze a substantial chunk of the stolen assets within minutes of Thursday's attack on Binance. Overall, about $3 billion linked to the case is now frozen. The agency didn't say exactly how much its own rapid work secured, so its slice of that total stays unspecified.

Binance has put its losses from the compromised hot wallets at $6.3 billion. That's the gap investigators are still chasing: a little over $3 billion locked down, billions more still in play. Federal agencies say they're tracking the remaining funds and working to recover them.

The freeze came together fast because investigators leaned on crypto industry partners right after the breach, according to the Secret Service. Identifying and locking stolen coins is a race against mixers and bridges, so minutes matter. This time, the clock apparently ran in the investigators' favor for at least part of the haul.

The FBI has pinned the theft on North Korea's TraderTraitor group and published hundreds of wallet addresses tied to the case. Naming those addresses gives exchanges and analytics firms a trail to watch. It also puts the hack in a familiar lane: state-linked crews hitting crypto infrastructure for hard currency.

Binance hasn't detailed how the hot wallets were compromised, and no arrests have been announced. What happens next hinges on how much of the remaining funds can be caught before they're laundered or swapped. For now, the scoreboard reads roughly $3 billion frozen, with the hunt still on.