ZachXBT Points to Crédit Mutuel Arkéa in Alleged $133M Crypto Theft

ZachXBT, an on-chain investigator, has pointed to French cooperative bank Crédit Mutuel Arkéa as the alleged victim of a cryptocurrency theft. He estimates the losses at more than $133 million.

There had been no public statement from Crédit Mutuel Arkéa at the time of writing. ZachXBT also thinks the final tally will grow once over-the-counter (OTC) trades are included.

From a $106 Million Warning to a French Bank

ZachXBT initially raised the alarm about the case on November 2. He said at that point that an unnamed entity in the EU had lost upwards of $106 million across several centralized exchange accounts.

According to him, the funds left those accounts in USDC (USDC) and Tether (USDT). A day later, he reported a further $27 million in withdrawals from exchanges, some of which arrived after he had first gone public.

ZachXBT’s latest update names Arkéa as the alleged institution. The lender, he said, holds $235 billion in assets, and the suspected attack continued for multiple days.

Arkéa encompasses the Crédit Mutuel de Bretagne and Crédit Mutuel du Sud-Ouest federations. Fortuneo, the online bank, is among its approximately 40 subsidiaries.

Why $30 Million Could Have Been Frozen, per ZachXBT

Before Arkéa was named, ZachXBT operated on the theory that a major Western European financial institution had been compromised. He also had suspicions that the matter was being hushed up.

“No proper incident disclosure has resulted in $30M+ being laundered away which could have been frozen by EU law enforcement,” he noted.

Separately, blockchain analytics firm Bitquery tracked $108.8 million in USDC connected to the suspected theft. The outflows were pulled from Kraken, Crypto.com and OKX accounts over roughly 21 hours on November 1 and 2.

Bitquery further found that $62.98 million in stablecoins was converted into 27,553 Ethereum (ETH) within about four hours.

Stablecoin issuers have used freezes this year to block considerably larger amounts. In the wake of the Binance hack, Tether and Circle were among the issuers that locked up around $2.9 billion, per Grayscale. That represented about 45% of the funds taken.

The note went on to say the Binance breach drove 2026 security losses in crypto to a record of more than $8 billion.

“Unfortunate as it is, the Binance hack will, in our view, result in stronger security practices for exchanges going forward. It also underscores the importance of institutional custody, such as offered by US-based crypto ETPs,” Zach Pandl, Grayscale Head of Research, wrote.

BeInCrypto has asked Crédit Mutuel Arkéa for comment and will update this article if a response comes. If confirmed, the case would put a regulated European bank among 2026’s crypto theft victims.