North Korea says U.S. and its followers are “demonizing us,” objects to high-risk money-laundering designation

[Financial News] North Korea has pushed back, saying that the United States and its followers are demonizing the country. It has continued its denunciations since recently being identified as the country behind the hacking of 8.4 trillion won worth of cryptocurrency from Binance.
A North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesperson pushed back against the country’s redesignation by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) as a “high-risk country” for money laundering on the 6th, saying, “It was fabricated by the United States and its followers with the sinister political aim of ‘demonizing’ (North Korea), and has nothing whatsoever to do with us,” the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported.
The spokesperson went on to denounce “the United States and Western forces, which, in pursuit of their hegemonic ambitions, brazenly violate the sovereignty and territorial integrity of sovereign states and cause social instability and chaos around the world,” calling them “the main culprits fomenting all manner of criminal acts today, such as money laundering, terrorism, drug trafficking and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
Earlier, the FATF held the first plenary meeting of its 35th session at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) headquarters in Paris, France, from the 26th to the 30th of last month, and decided to maintain North Korea’s status as a “high-risk country” (blacklist). The FATF assesses how countries implement international standards on money laundering and terrorist financing. North Korea has been classified as a high-risk country since 2011.
It has been argued that urgent cooperation among South Korea, the United States and Japan is needed to recover the coins worth 8.4 trillion won that North Korea stole from Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. The time available to freeze and recover the stolen funds is only hours or days, not months. Moreover, based on on-chain and off-chain (inside and outside the blockchain ledger) evidence, the international community considers it certain that North Korea was behind the incident.

[email protected] Kim Kyung-soo Reporter