The FBI, Europol, and other international agencies have disabled ChipMixer, a cryptocurrency mixing service with ties to the FTX and Axie Infinity attacks.
The Justice Department stated in a news release published on Wednesday that investigators seized $46 million worth of cryptocurrency along with the service’s domains and GitHub account.
ChipMixer’s Capabilities
Crypto mixing services such as ChipMixer make it more difficult for other parties, such as law enforcement, to trace crypto transactions by combining many payments into a single pool of crypto before separating and transmitting each amount to its designated destination.
Unlike crypto services registered to operate in the United States, law enforcement reports that it did not gather identifying information about its users. According to the DOJ, between 2017 and the present, ChipMixer laundered almost $3 billion worth of cryptocurrencies.
Customers with criminal intent include the North Korean hacker squad that stole over $600 million from the Axie Infinity blockchain software and the crooks who siphoned off millions from the now-defunct FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
In addition, the DOJ charged the service’s owner, Minh Quc Nguyn, with money laundering, identity theft, and operating an unregistered money transfer business.
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Government-Targeted Crypto Mixer
The US Department of the Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash and Blender.io in 2017 for assisting North Korean hackers in laundering stolen assets from the Axie Infinity cyberattack. In the wake of FTX’s fall, the government has intensified its examination of crypto in general.
US attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Jacqueline Romero notes in a statement that ChipMixer facilitated criminals of all shades in evading detection by facilitating the laundering of money, particularly Bitcoin, on a global scale.
The public’s faith in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology is weakened by services such as ChipMixer, which are designed to conceal the origins and destinations of exorbitant quantities of illicit funds.
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