The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, better known as Europol, announced that it had dismantled ‘Cryptomixer,’ a digital asset mixing service that allegedly laundered over $1.5 billion in BTC since 2016.
According to the EU law enforcement agency, it supported an operation conducted by law enforcement authorities from Switzerland and Germany to take down the illegal mixing service ‘Cryptomixer,’ which is suspected of facilitating cybercrime and money laundering.
A digital asset mixer, also known as a tumbler, is a platform that mixes potentially identifiable digital asset funds with others, usually by pooling funds, to obfuscate the trail back to the fund’s original source.
“Mixing services such as Cryptomixer offer their clients anonymity and are often used before criminals redirect their laundered assets to cryptocurrency exchanges,” said Europol. “This allows ‘cleaned’ cryptocurrency to be exchanged for other cryptocurrencies or for FIAT currency through cash machines or bank accounts.”
According to Europol, the Swiss-based Cryptomixer provided software that “blocked the traceability of funds on the blockchain, making it the platform of choice for cybercriminals seeking to launder illegal proceeds from a variety of criminal activities, such as drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, ransomware attacks, and payment card fraud.”
The agency added that, since its creation in 2016, over EUR 1.3 billion (roughly $1.5 billion) in BTC has been mixed through Cryptomixer.
During the operation to take down the mixer service, Europol said that three servers were seized in Switzerland, along with the cryptomixer.io domain. The operation also resulted in the confiscation of over 12 terabytes of data and more than EUR 25 million ($29 million) worth of BTC.
After the illegal service was taken over and shut down, law enforcement placed a seizure banner on the website.
Global war on mixers
This is just the latest effort by international authorities to combat these controversial digital asset mixing services.
In March 2023, Europol supported the takedown of the largest mixing service at that time, ‘Chipmixer,’ which was accused of laundering EUR 2.73 billion ($3.17 billion) in criminal funds.
Another prominent example is Tornado Cash, the notorious digital asset mixer sanctioned by the United States Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in 2022.
The Treasury Department accused the mixer of having aided criminal actors with money laundering since its founding in 2019, including hundreds of millions of dollars allegedly stolen by the North Korea state-backed hacking group Lazarus.
The co-founders of Tornado Cash, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, were eventually charged by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) with money laundering and sanctions violations. In August, a New York court found Roman Storm guilty for his part in the platform.
“Roman Storm and Tornado Cash provided a service for North Korean hackers and other criminals to move and hide more than $1 billion of dirty money,” said U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton at the time. “Criminals who use new technology to commit age old crimes, including hiding dirty money, undermine the public trust, and unfairly cast a shadow on the many innovators who operate lawfully.”
Storm was convicted of one count of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business and faces up to five years in prison.
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Source: https://coingeek.com/europol-shuts-down-1-5b-cryptomixer-money-laundering-scheme/