Crédit Mutuel Arkéa confirms cyberattack led to the theft of roughly $133 million from the bank itself
Attackers reportedly converted stolen funds into cryptocurrency and laundered them across multiple services and blockchains
Bank says customer assets were unaffected, while investigators continue probing the third-party compromise
Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, a major French banking and financial services group, has confirmed it recently suffered a cyberattack that resulted in the theft of around $133 million. The stolen money apparently did not belong to customers, but rather to the bank itself, and was converted into cryptocurrency to be siphoned out more easily. The attack was first spotted by ZachXBT, a cryptocurrency analyst and blockchain fraud investigator who issued an alert on November 2 2026. “An EU entity is suspected of losing $106M+ from multiple centralized exchange accounts yesterday (Nov 1),” he said at the time. “The suspected stolen funds were withdrawn as USDC & USDT by an illicit actor.” Blockchain as the tech of choice for both sides
It appears the attackers converted fiat currency into different cryptos before sending them out. As ZachXBT explained, the threat actor was “aggressively swapping” USDC (a stablecoin currency, one whose value is pegged to that of the US dollar) for ETH (Ethereum) and transferring the tokens to instant exchanges such as WellWallet and Keyrex. Some of the funds were converted to XMR (Monero, a known privacy-first token whose transactions are notoriously difficult to track) via Wagyu, and later bridged “across multiple chains.” The irony is pbvious – blockchain and cryptocurrencies are often perceived as the go-to platforms for financial fraud and while many defend it by saying the fraud conducted via fiat is magnitudes larger, the fact remains the crooks transferred dollars to cryptos during theft. On the other hand, the attack was not even discovered (at least publicly) until it hit the public blockchain where analysts like ZachXBT were able to see it and report on it…