Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has named Crédit Mutuel Arkéa as the alleged victim of a cryptocurrency theft exceeding $133 million, expanding an investigation into suspicious withdrawals fr
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has named Crédit Mutuel Arkéa as the alleged victim of a cryptocurrency theft exceeding $133 million, expanding an investigation into suspicious withdrawals from multiple centralized exchange accounts.
The November 4 disclosure identified the French banking group after earlier alerts referred only to an unnamed European institution. ZachXBT described Arkéa as holding approximately $235 billion in assets and said the suspected attack continued over several days, with potential additional losses involving over-the-counter transactions.
The bank’s involvement has not been independently confirmed. No public response addressing the allegation was identified at publication, and the disclosures do not establish whether the affected assets belonged to the institution, its customers or another party.
ZachXBT’s initial alert on November 2 identified more than $106 million in suspected losses from exchange accounts the previous day. The funds were withdrawn as USDC and USDT before being moved through multiple services and blockchains.
He subsequently identified another $27 million-plus in exchange withdrawals, bringing his estimate above $133 million. Some withdrawals occurred after his initial public warning, indicating that the suspected outflows continued after the incident had attracted attention.
The investigator published 11 suspected theft addresses in the original alert and four additional addresses in the follow-up. He did not name the exchanges holding the affected accounts or explain how the attacker obtained access.
The suspected laundering involved swapping USDC for ether, transferring funds through instant exchanges and converting assets into Monero. ZachXBT named WellWallet and Kyrrex among the services receiving transfers and identified Wagyu as a route for conversions into XMR.
Those observations describe the movement of funds; they do not establish that the services knowingly participated in the theft.
“I suspect the amount stolen is larger when accounting for OTC activity,” ZachXBT wrote in the update naming Arkéa. He did not provide a separate estimate for those transactions.
ZachXBT also alleged that inadequate disclosure allowed more than $30 million to be laundered that European law enforcement could otherwise have frozen. He described a possible cover-up as his working theory, rather than an established finding.
Neither deliberate concealment nor the amount that authorities could have intercepted has been independently verified. The $30 million figure concerns funds allegedly moved during the incident, not a separate loss to add to the $133 million estimate.
The attacker remains unidentified. ZachXBT said he was highly confident that Lazarus Group was not responsible, citing multiple laundering indicators. He did not publicly detail those indicators, and his assessment is not a formal law-enforcement attribution.
The disclosures follow Mercado Bitcoin’s suspension of services after a security breach and the FBI’s attribution of the Binance theft to North Korea’s TraderTraitor operation. ZachXBT’s posts provide no evidence connecting the suspected Arkéa incident to either case.
The latest update does not establish how the exchange accounts were compromised, whether unauthorized access has been contained or how much cryptocurrency has been frozen or recovered.
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