 | |
Type of site | Cryptocurrency tumbler |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Country of origin | Vietnam |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Launched | 2017 |
| Current status | Defunct |
ChipMixer was a cryptocurrency laundering service operated out of Vietnam from servers run in Germany. [1] The service was allegedly used to launder more than three billion dollars over a period of six years. [2]
The service allowed customers to obfuscate the origin of cryptocurrency transactions. [3] This anonymization was useful for criminals who used the service when purchasing illicit goods from darknet markets. [4] Additionally, criminals needing to hide the origins of ransomware payouts used the site.
The website and backend servers were seized by the Bundespolizei, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, and Europol on March 15, 2023. The German police seized 46 million dollars in cryptocurrency. [5]
Money laundering is the process of illegally concealing the origin of money obtained from illicit activities such as drug trafficking, underground sex work, terrorism, corruption, embezzlement, and treason, and converting the funds into a seemingly legitimate source, usually through a front organization. Money laundering is ipso facto illegal; the acts generating the money almost always are themselves criminal in some way. As financial crime has become more complex and financial intelligence is more important in combating international crime and terrorism, money laundering has become a prominent political, economic, and legal debate. Most countries implement some anti-money-laundering measures.
Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts the victim's personal data until a ransom is paid. They commonly use difficult-to-trace digital currencies such as paysafecard or Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are used for the ransoms, making tracing and prosecuting the perpetrators difficult. Sometimes the original files can be retrieved without paying the ransom due to implementation mistakes, leaked cryptographic keys or a complete lack of encryption in the ransomware.
A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it.
BTC-e was a cryptocurrency trading platform primarily serving the Russian market, with servers located in the United States. The U.S. government seized their website and funds in 2017. It was founded in July 2011 by Alexander Vinnik and Aleksandr Bilyuchenko, and as of February 2015 handled around 3% of all Bitcoin exchange volume. The platform was eventually taken over by Russian Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, and funds from BTC-e were used for the war in Donbass, under the control of the FSB.
Monero is a cryptocurrency which uses a blockchain with privacy-enhancing technologies to obfuscate transactions to achieve anonymity and fungibility. Observers cannot decipher addresses trading Monero, transaction amounts, address balances, or transaction histories.
A cryptocurrency tumbler or cryptocurrency mixing service is a service that mixes potentially identifiable or "tainted" cryptocurrency funds with others, so as to obscure the trail back to the fund's original source. This is usually done by pooling together source funds from multiple inputs for a large and random period of time, and then spitting them back out to destination addresses. As all the funds are lumped together and then distributed at random times, it is very difficult to trace exact coins. Tumblers have arisen to improve the anonymity of cryptocurrencies, usually bitcoin, since the digital currencies provide a public ledger of all transactions. Due to its goal of anonymity, tumblers have been used to money launder cryptocurrency.
DeepDotWeb was a news site dedicated to events in and surrounding the dark web featuring interviews and reviews about darknet markets, Tor hidden services, privacy, bitcoin, and related news. The website was seized on May 7, 2019, during an investigation into the owners' affiliate marketing model, in which they received money for posting links to certain darknet markets, and for which they were charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering. In March 2021 site administrator Tal Prihar pleaded guilty to his charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
United States virtual currency law is financial regulation as applied to transactions in virtual currency in the U.S. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has regulated and may continue to regulate virtual currencies as commodities. The Securities and Exchange Commission also requires registration of any virtual currency traded in the U.S. if it is classified as a security and of any trading platform that meets its definition of an exchange.
OneCoin is a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme conducted by offshore companies OneCoin Ltd and OneLife Network Ltd, both founded by Ruja Ignatova in concert with Sebastian Greenwood. OneCoin is considered a Ponzi scheme due to its organisational structure of paying early investors using money obtained from newer ones. It was also a pyramid scheme due to the recruiting of investors without providing any actual product. The company maintained its own database of coins rather than using a blockchain and had no mining process which limited its ability to release and circulate coins. Many of the people central to OneCoin had been previously involved in similar schemes and business malpractice. OneCoin was described by The Times as "one of the biggest scams in history".
Bitfinex is a cryptocurrency exchange owned and operated by iFinex Inc, and is registered in the British Virgin Islands. Bitfinex was founded in 2012. It was originally a peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange, and later added support for other cryptocurrencies.
Alexander Vinnik is a Russian computer expert. From 2011 to 2017, he worked at BTC-e, a Russian cryptocurrency exchange.
Binance Holdings Ltd., branded Binance, is a global company that operates the largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies. Binance was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao, a developer who had previously created high-frequency trading software. Binance was initially based in China, then moved to Japan shortly before the Chinese government restricted cryptocurrency companies. Binance subsequently left Japan for Malta and currently has no official company headquarters.
Cryptocurrency and crime describe notable examples of cybercrime related to theft of cryptocurrencies and some methods or security vulnerabilities commonly exploited. Cryptojacking is a form of cybercrime specific to cryptocurrencies used on websites to hijack a victim's resources and use them for hashing and mining cryptocurrency.
Ruja Plamenova Ignatova is a Bulgarian-born German entrepreneur best known as one of the FBI’s Top Ten wanted Fugitives, and as the founder of a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme known as OneCoin, which The Times described as "one of the biggest scams in history." She was the subject of the 2019 BBC podcast series The Missing Cryptoqueen and the 2022 book of the same name. Ignatova boarded a flight to Athens on October 25, 2017, and has not been seen since.
Blockchain analysis is the process of inspecting, identifying, clustering, modeling and visually representing data on a cryptographic distributed-ledger known as a blockchain. The goal of blockchain analysis is to discover useful information about different actors transacting in cryptocurrency. Analysis of public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is typically conducted by private companies like Chainalysis, TRM Labs, Elliptic, Nansen, CipherTrace, Elementus, Dune Analytics, CryptoQuant, and Ormi Labs.
The Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange was hacked in August 2016. 119,756 bitcoin, worth about US$72 million at the time, was stolen.
Hydra was a Russian language dark web marketplace, founded in 2015, that facilitated trafficking of illegal drugs, financial services including cryptocurrency tumbling for money laundering, exchange services between cryptocurrency and Russian rubles, and the sale of falsified documents and hacking services. Hydra was shut down by American and German law enforcement action in April 2022, and its operator was sentenced to life in prison by a Russian court in December 2024.
Chainalysis is an American blockchain analysis firm headquartered in New York City. The company was co-founded by Michael Gronager, Jan Møller and Jonathan Levin in 2014, and is the first start-up company dedicated to the business of Bitcoin tracing. It offers compliance and investigation software to analyze the blockchain public ledger, which is primarily used to track virtual currencies. Along with banks and brokers its customers have included the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation, as well as the United Kingdom's National Crime Agency.
Tornado Cash is an open source, non-custodial, fully decentralized cryptocurrency tumbler that runs on Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible networks. It offers a service that mixes potentially identifiable or "tainted" cryptocurrency funds with others, so as to obscure the trail back to the fund's original source. This is a privacy tool used in EVM networks where all transactions are public by default.
Operation Destabilise was an international investigation led by the National Crime Agency which, over the course of three years, uncovered a money laundering ring with ties to criminal organisations in the UK, drug cartels in South America, the Kinahan Organised Crime Group, Russian espionage efforts and sanction avoidance.