Blockchain investigator ZachXBT said Oct. 5 that he fronted $349,700 of his own funds to pose as a client of an alleged Chinese laundering network, gathering intelligence that he says helped freeze proceeds from the Bybit hack.
In the 12-post account on X, he alleged that the network laundered more than $1 billion across multiple exploits for North Korea's Lazarus Group. He said he accepted a 5% loss on each order to build trust and obtain advance warning of fund movements.
The clearest result he described was a 442,000 USDT freeze by Tether. ZachXBT said three Solana addresses supplied by his contact exposed a cluster of more than $12 million in Bybit proceeds moving through Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and Tron.
Etherscan shows about 442,399 USDT at the Ethereum address he identified for the freeze, labeled as a Uniswap V2 liquidity pool. The address balance does not establish a freeze or who controlled the funds; those claims remain ZachXBT's attribution.