Authorities from Germany and the United States have seized over $46 million worth of bitcoins (BTC) from mixing service ChipMixer, according to a statement by the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) on Wednesday.
Authorities Shut Down ChipMixer’s Infrastructure
According to Europol, the authorities have taken down the infrastructure of the mixer, seizing four servers, 7 terabytes of data, and roughly 1909.4 BTC (Approx. 46.8 million in current prices) on March 15.
The agency stated that the action was taken after the national authorities investigated and discovered that the mixer had been used to facilitate the laundering of billions of dollars worth of crypto assets. The investigation was also supported by authorities in Belgium, Poland, and Switzerland, according to Europol.
Launched in 2017, ChipMixer is a Bitcoin mixing service that uses chip-based transactions to provide a higher degree of privacy and anonymity. Europol said the mixer enabled clients to conceal the trail of illegal proceeds from criminal activities such as drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, ransomware attacks, and payment card fraud.
$3.7B in Criminal Proceeds Laundered
The law enforcement agency stated that an investigation into the mixer suggests it has been used to launder over 152,000 BTC (Roughly $3.7 billion in current estimations) in criminal proceeds.
“A large share of this is connected to darkweb markets, ransomware groups, illicit goods trafficking, procurement of child sexual exploitation material, and stolen crypto assets,” the agency stated.
According to Europol, ransomware actors such as Zeppelin, SunCrypt, Mamba, Dharma, or Lockbit have used ChipMixer to launder ransom payments. The agency also revealed that national authorities are conducting investigations to determine whether some of the crypto assets stolen shortly after the bankruptcy of crypto exchange FTX were laundered through ChipMixer.
ChipMixer has now been added to the list of crypto mixers being targeted by authorities in recent times. About seven months ago, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned the popular Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash for being used to launder more than $7 billion worth of crypto assets since 2019.
