Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, recently seized 1,909 Bitcoins with a total value of roughly $50 million.
The organization is one in a press release announced that it has successfully shut down ChipMixer, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency mixers. Law enforcement agencies from countries such as Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Poland and the United States of America took part in the joint operation.
During the action, the authorities confiscated 4 servers and 7 terabytes of data in addition to the BTC in question.
According to Europol, ChipMixer has laundered 152,000 Bitcoins (approximately $3.69 billion) since its inception in 2017.
“Most of the assets are linked to dark web marketplaces, ransomware gangs, illegal trade, child sexual exploitation and stolen crypto”read the official statement.
ZachXBT, on-chain security analyst, November tweet according to the hackers who orchestrated the collapse of FTX transferred the assets to the OKX crypto exchange via ChipMixer.
As you know, a cryptocurrency mixer is a service provider capable of masking the data that can be used to associate an address with transactions. The service is usually used by people who want to hide their transactions from prying eyes.
By the way, this was not the first such raid, in January of this year Europol, in cooperation with Eurojust, exposed a criminal organization specializing in crypto fraud. In addition to seizing $1 million in crypto and €50,000 in cash, 15 people were also arrested. The members of the network were located in Bulgaria, Serbia and Cyprus and conducted the scams from there.
However, contrary to popular belief, cryptocurrencies are not tools of crime. This fact can also be supported by data, since, for example, during the year 2021, only 0.05% of all cryptocurrency transactions were related to money laundering.
