Investigators from various European countries and the US, with the support of Europol, have shut down a notorious online money laundering service.
The European police authority Europol announced on Wednesday that ransomware gangs such as Zeppelin, SunCrypt, Mamba, Dharma or Lockbit had used the “ChipMixer” service to launder ransom money received. It is said to be the world’s largest service of its kind.
The servers of the Darknet platform located in data centers in Germany have been seized, as announced by the Frankfurt am Main Public Prosecutor and the Federal Criminal Investigation Department. In addition, cryptocurrencies worth about 44 million euros were secured.
The prime suspect has been evicted by the FBI of the US Federal Police for manhunt, it is said.
According to Europol, four servers with about 7 terabytes (TB) of data were seized.
According to the announcement, ChipMixer was founded in 2017, was available on both the normal internet (“Clear Web”) and the dark web and, according to Europol, offered users “complete anonymity”. This kind of illegal service is often used by criminals before the laundered money is funneled to (mainstream) cryptocurrency exchanges.
A criminal investigation found that the platform may have facilitated the laundering of 152,000 Bitcoin (more than 2.65 billion Swiss francs by current estimates) worth of crypto assets.
A large portion of these illicit funds are linked to dark web markets, ransomware groups, illicit commodity trading, procurement of child sexual exploitation equipment, and stolen crypto assets.
The following national police forces were involved in the action against the ChipMixer platform:
According to a report by Europol, investigators obtained information about illegal transactions worth several million euros during the closure of the Russian darknet marketplace Hydra Market in April 2022.
The Zurich cantonal police could not provide any information about the case on Wednesday. A press release will be issued Thursday, it said.
Soource :Watson
I am Amelia James, a passionate journalist with a deep-rooted interest in current affairs. I have more than five years of experience in the media industry, working both as an author and editor for 24 Instant News. My main focus lies in international news, particularly regional conflicts and political issues around the world.
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