How to launder $600 million on the internet

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Erin Plante is a private detective who specializes in chasing down stolen cryptocurrency. In March of 2022, she got the biggest assignment of her career: Hackers had broken into an online game called Axie Infinity and made off with over $600 million worth of digital money.

It was the largest crypto heist in history. And now it was Erin's job to find that money and get it back. Erin's investigation would lead her to face off against some of the world's most formidable digital money launderers, whose actions would soon raise alarms at the highest levels of government — even threaten the nuclear security of the entire planet.

This episode was hosted by Jeff Guo and Keith Romer, produced by James Sneed, edited by Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Willa Rubin & Sam Yellowhorse Kesler, and engineered by Maggie Luthar. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

Transcript

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0:15.4	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:20.8	One of the biggest things in the world of crypto a couple years ago was this game called
0:26.2	Axi Infinity.
0:28.2	You can think of it as like blockchain Pokemon.
0:31.9	You buy these tiny little digital pet blobs with tiny legs and you fight them against
0:37.2	other people's tiny pet blobs.
0:40.0	Except every pet is also an NFT, basically this digital beanie baby.
0:46.2	And some of them were selling for thousands of dollars.
0:49.0	People have made this game their full-time job.
0:51.7	You can even trade your Axis for cryptocurrency on our marketplace.
0:55.1	A lot of Axi's fans seem to convince that the game was proof that crypto could be used
1:00.1	to create an entire economic ecosystem.
1:02.8	The company behind Axi Infinity grew into a multi-billion dollar business.
1:08.1	Then in March of 2022, this candy-colored paradise full of happy-go-lucky but also weirdly lucrative
1:15.2	digital pets was the scene of a shocking crime.
1:19.4	A heist!
1:20.4	They were heisted!
1:21.4	It was a heist!
	...

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