Alleged Munchables Team Member with Ties to North Korea Returns $60 Million in Stolen Crypto After Exposure

Munchables, a gaming protocol based on Blast, experienced a significant breach on March 27, resulting in the loss of over $62.5 million in Ethereum (ETH) due to a hacker attack.

The Munchables team has acknowledged the potential involvement of one of its own members in a recent announcement.

In a now-deleted Telegram post, blockchain investigator ZachXBT revealed an address linked to the hacker, identifying them as a "DPRK IT Worker." Shortly after this disclosure, Dan from Pixelcraft Studios shared insights, stating that their team had previously considered hiring the individual for game development work in 2022 but terminated the arrangement due to suspicions of potential ties to North Korean hackers.

"We actually gave this guy a trial hire back in 2022 to do some game dev work and he was sketchy af, definitely felt like he could be an NK [North Korean] hacker. We fired him within a month." - Dan, Pixelcraft Studios

Following the unveiling of the attacker's identity and subsequent blockchain investigations, it was revealed that the perpetrator had multiple addresses associated with centralized exchanges like Binance, MEXC, and ChangeNOW.

In response to the public exposure, the attacker decided to return all the stolen funds. The Munchables team confirmed that the individual agreed to return the funds without any conditions attached and provided relevant private keys to assist in recovering user funds.

Munchables, a relatively new decentralized finance (gamefi) application focused on gaming, operates on the Ethereum layer-2 network Blast. It enables players to access in-game items in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) through crypto staking.