Laywer pops up on Arbitrum DAO forums seeking funds for victims of decades-old North Korean terrorist acts

Arbitrum delegates are in the process of weighing whether to release 30,765 ETH frozen after last month's rsETH exploit into a coordinated recovery effort. But a lawyer for victims of North Korean terrorism showed up in the forum and told them they couldn’t.

The ether was drained from restaked ETH holders (a representative token of ETH that is locked on another platform for fixed yields) during the April 19 Kelp DAO bridge exploit, which CoinDesk previously reported as the largest DeFi hack of 2026.

The governance post, authored by attorney Charles Gerstein, serves as a restraining notice under New York law on behalf of three sets of judgment creditors holding roughly $877 million in claims against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The claims behind the filing stretch back decades. One stems from the 1972 Lod Airport massacre in Israel, where gunmen killed 26 people, including 17 Puerto Rican pilgrims, in an attack later found by a U.S. court to have been supported by North Korea.

Another involves Reverend Kim Dong Shik, a U.S. permanent resident abducted near the China border in 2000 and later killed in DPRK custody. A third ties to the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, where a federal judge found Pyongyang had supplied weapons and training used in rocket attacks.

The plaintiffs won their cases but North Korea has never paid. With sovereign assets effectively impossible to seize, the families have spent years searching for any North Korean property they can legally collect against to satisfy their judgments.

Gerstein's filing argues that because U.S. authorities have linked the Lazarus Group, the hacking unit responsible for the exploit, to the North Korean state, the 30,765 ETH frozen by Arbitrum's Security Council qualifies as North Korean property under U.S. enforcement law.

If the court accepts that framing, the families with unpaid judgments would have a senior legal claim on those funds, ahead of the rsETH depositors who originally held them.

The reason Arbitrum is involved is straightforward: after the rsETH exploit, its Security Council froze 30,765 ETH at a specific address on its network, effectively placing the funds under its control. Gerstein’s filing points to three underlying cases, Calderon-Cardona, Kim, and Kaplan, with writs of execution totaling roughly $877 Million.