French bank Crédit Mutuel Arkéa exploited for over $133 million, ZachXBT says

Onchain investigator ZachXBT has identified French cooperative bank Crédit Mutuel Arkéa as the alleged victim of a theft estimated at more than $133 million.

ZachXBT first reported on Nov. 2 that an unnamed EU entity had lost over $106 million from multiple centralized exchange accounts the previous day, with funds withdrawn as USDC and USDT. 

A day later, he raised the total stolen amount to above $133 million after tracing an additional $27 million in withdrawals, some of which occurred after his initial disclosure. He speculated that a large financial institution in Western Europe was exploited and currently being covered up.

On the evening of Nov. 3, he stated that the institution is allegedly Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, a French bank with approximately $235 billion in assets. He noted that the attack spanned multiple days and suggested the actual losses could be higher when accounting for possible over-the-counter activity.

"Over the past 24 hours the illicit actor has been aggressively swapping USDC for ETH, transferring to instant exchanges (WellWallet, Kyrrex, etc), converting to XMR via Wagyu, and bridging across multiple chains," ZachXBT wrote in his Nov. 2 message in his Telegram group, adding that he has a "high degree of confidence" that the attacker is not associated with North Korea's Lazarus Group.

He has criticized the institution for allegedly allowing more than $30 million to be laundered, noting that proper incident disclosure to EU law enforcement could have frozen the funds. 

Crédit Mutuel Arkéa has not issued any public statement confirming or denying the incident. The Block has reached out to the bank but has not heard back. The claims remain based on ZachXBT's own analysis and have not been independently verified by the bank or authorities.

The bank has more than 5.6 million customers, with total assets of 211.5 billion euros (around $237 billion).