Crypto ‘Mixer’ Laundered $700 Million For Customers, Including Russian And North Korean Spies, DOJ Says by iblametom
“ChipMixer facilitated the laundering of cryptocurrency, specifically bitcoin, on a vast international scale, abetting nefarious actors and criminals of all kinds in evading detection,” said U.S. attorney Jacqueline Romero. “We cannot and will not allow criminals’ exploitation of technology to threaten our national and economic security.”
ChipMixer charged a small fee to take in clients’ cryptocurrency and spread it across different accounts, in order to complicate law enforcement tracking of criminal proceeds, police said. In total, it processed $3 billion, nearly a billion of which has been traced to crimes, including ransomware incidents and darknet market drug sales, the DOJ said.
Tom Robinson, founder of cryptocurrency tracking company Elliptic, said it was a “very significant” takedown. “Chipmixer was the largest centralized mixer in operation,” he told. He pointed to its use by the Lazarus Group, one of North Korea’s most notorious hacking groups, accused of major crypto thefts. That included a breach of Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge last year, which saw $540 million stolen, and a hack of Harmony’s Horizon Bridge in 2020, when $100 million went missing.
According to the FBI, it traced $17 million in ransomware proceeds linked to 37 different groups to ChipMixer’s services. Over $800,000 in bitcoin laundered via the mixer was from a ransomware strain known as Sodinokibi, otherwise known as REvil. Its most significant breach came in 2021 when it targeted, with as many as 1,500 businesses breached and a $70 million ransom demanded.
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