Senator Elizabeth Warren Criticizes Crypto, Claims It Threatens U.S. Security and “Helps Terrorists
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) criticized North Korea’s crypto usage and the rise of crypto “pig butchering” scams at a Thursday hearing of the Senate of Armed Services, claiming that cryptocurrency as a whole poses “a threat to our national security.”
Questioning Admiral John C. Aquilino of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, Warren alleged that North Korea could pay for over 56 intercontinental ballistic missiles with the $1.7 billion worth of crypto the country stole in 2022.
When asked by Warren if the number surprised him, Aquilino confessed it did not.
North Korea has long been known for its crypto malware groups, with state-sponsored hacking collective the Lazarus Group and crypto mixer Sinbad sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in November 2023 for illicit activities.
“(Crypto) is helping rogue states,” said Warren. “It’s helping terrorists. It’s helping criminal organizations fund their operations on a scale like we have never seen before.”
However, blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis’ 2024 Crypto Crime Report found that funds sent to crypto mixers from illicit addresses decreased by nearly half a billion dollars last year “likely due to law enforcement and regulatory efforts.”
Warren’s criticism of crypto did not stop with North Korea, however. In her testimony Thursday, the senator claimed that “more than 40,000 people in the United States lost more than $3.5 billion dollars in pig butchering crypto scams that we know of” in last year alone.
Common across southeast Asia, “pig butchering” involves perpetrators exploiting a victim’s trust in order to increase the amount of funds a given victim will send to them.
“Now, pig butchering is just one
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