The European Union Police Department (Europol) and the US Department of Justice ordered the closure of the ChipMixer transaction mixing service, confiscated $46 million in Bitcoin and charged the Vietnamese founder.
According to the latest announcement from Europol, ChipMixer had its website confiscated by US and German authorities because of allegations related to money laundering support activities. The agency seized 4 servers, 7TB of data and about 1,909 BTC (equivalent to 46 million USD).
Belgian, Polish and Swiss authorities also assisted in the investigation of the incident.
ChipMixer was launched in 2017 with the aim of providing anonymity to traders. The tool allegedly erased traces of 152,000 BTC ($3.8 billion) of “dirty money” coming from dark web markets, ransomware, illegal goods sales, child exploitation material and large amounts of money. Encryption hacked.
Ransomware such as Zeppelin, SunCrypt, Mamba, Dharma and Lockbit also use ChipMixer to get rid of the money trail.
Notably, the US Department of Justice also charged the person behind ChipMixer, a Vietnamese citizen named Minh Quoc Nguyen, 49 years old, living in Hanoi. This person is accused of running a money laundering, identity theft, and illegal currency transaction ring through ChipMixer.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Minh Quoc Nguyen.
In August 2022, the US Treasury Department sanctioned another popular money mixer, Tornado Cash, saying it had “aided” the notorious North Korean criminal group – Lazarus Group – in laundering large amounts of money dirty.
The Tornado Cash development team was later targeted by the authorities, at which point developer Alexey Pertsev was arrested by Dutch authorities with a prison term until April 2023.
However, recently a "successor" project to Tornado Cash appeared, rebuilt by one of the original developers, called Privacy Pool, upgraded with additional "transparency" features for traders to avoid government scrutiny.
*Original article posted at website Coin68.com
