The FBI and the Justice Department announced Thursday that they have seized or restrained more than $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency stolen from the exchange Binance, part of what officials call the largest crypto heist ever recorded.

The theft itself was enormous: roughly $6.3 billion in digital assets vanished from Binance last month, according to CBS News. The U.S. government and private-sector partners have now jointly frozen more than $2.7 billion of that total, and a federal court has authorized the seizure of $1.2 billion of it.

Investigators have pinned the theft on TraderTraitor, a hacking group the FBI has repeatedly linked to the North Korean government. Pyongyang has denied involvement, calling the accusation a "grave political provocation," according to The Washington Post.

TODAY'S SEIZURE SHOWS THAT AMERICA WILL CONTINUE THE FIGHT AGAINST ROGUE STATES WHO FINANCIALLY GAIN FROM CYBERCRIME.

That's Bill Essayli, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, who helped announce the seizure alongside Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. Pirro said the government moved fast once the theft surfaced: "By springing into action at a moment's notice, we worked together to freeze this massive criminal fraud in its tracks."

A list of 500 wallets

As part of the response, the FBI published roughly 500 Ethereum wallet addresses tied to the stolen funds and is urging exchanges and blockchain analytics firms to block any transactions that touch them — an attempt to choke off the laundering pipeline before the rest of the money can be cashed out.

Officials cautioned the recovery effort is far from finished. The Justice Department said tracing, freezing, seizing and ultimately forfeiting the remaining stolen assets is still ongoing, and the process of returning seized funds to victims typically runs through a federal forfeiture proceeding, where a judge decides who has a legitimate claim.

The announcement came the same day the FBI separately blamed North Korea for a different scheme, dubbed FaceStealer, which officials say used hijacked messaging apps and deepfake video calls to steal roughly $400 million in crypto over the past 18 months, per The Washington Times.

Binance has not said how much, if any, of the recovered funds will be returned to affected customers, or when. For now, the case stands as the government's largest crypto-forfeiture action to date — and a reminder, officials said, that North Korea continues to treat cryptocurrency theft as a primary funding stream for its weapons programs.