Crime: Investigators: Major money laundering service shut down on the dark web

crime
Investigators: Major money laundering service shut down on the dark web

Investigators shut down major money laundering service on the dark web. photo

© Fernando Gutierrez-Juarez/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa

According to investigators, it was the world’s top-selling money laundering service on the dark web: Criminals are said to have laundered billions of euros via the “ChipMixer” platform. The authorities managed to shut it down.

The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and the Central Office for Combating Internet Crime (ZIT) of the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office have shut down the world’s top-selling money laundering service on the dark web, according to their own statements. According to the investigators, the “ChipMixer” portal seized not only data of around seven terabytes but also bitcoin currently worth around 44 million euros. This is the highest seizure of crypto assets by the BKA to date.

The Darknet is a hidden part of the Internet that is often used by criminals to do illegal business with digital currencies such as Bitcoin.

According to the investigators, the operators of “ChipMixer” are suspected, among other things, of having operated commercial money laundering and a criminal trading platform on the Internet. The BKA worked closely with the US authorities and Europol on the investigation. The US agency FBI wrote out the alleged main suspect for manhunt.

A spokesman for the ZIT in Frankfurt did not rule out that suspects would also be identified in Germany. Because in the course of the previous investigations, two server structures in Germany had also been identified.

Faeser: Great success of German law enforcement

Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) spoke of a great success for German law enforcement agencies. “Crypto-money laundering services have now become an important part of criminal cyber activities, especially extortion through ransomware attacks. Therefore, this investigative success is particularly important,” she said. It is another example of “effective, internationally well-coordinated criminal prosecution in cyberspace – which will also serve to advance the investigation of further cyber crimes and prevent German infrastructures from being misused for criminal purposes with funds from illegal activities.”

According to the information, “ChipMixer” was a service that had been in existence since mid-2017, which primarily accepted Bitcoin with suspected criminal origins in order to pay them out again after concealment processes – the so-called “mixing”. Arms and drug dealers are said to have used the service to “clean up” income in the digital currency Bitcoin from illegal transactions.

According to the investigators, to make investigations more difficult or to prevent them entirely, the deposited crypto assets were divided into small amounts – so-called chips. The chips of the users were then mixed up and the origin of the funds was hidden in this way. The “ChipMixer” portal has promised its users complete anonymity.

Investigators assume that “ChipMixer” has laundered crypto assets of around 154,000 Bitcoin or 2.8 billion euros since 2017. A large part of these funds are said to come from dark web marketplaces, ransomware groups and other criminal activities. For example, there is a suspicion that parts of crypto values ​​that were stolen in 2022 in connection with the bankruptcy of a large crypto exchange were washed via “ChipMixer”. According to the investigators, transactions in the millions from the Darknet platform “Hydra Market” could also be proven. ZIT and BKA had already switched off this platform last April.

dpa

source site-5