German and Swiss Police in collaboration with Europol have shut down the crypto-currency mixer, cryptomixer.io. The mixer was used to hide the provenance of bitcoin tokens. Up to €25 million worth of bitcoin has been seized along with the servers in Switzerland and up to 23 terabytes of data. Europol released a cartoon describing the operation entitled “Operation Olympia”.
Europol states that since its inception in 2016, up to €1.6 billion were laundered through cryptiomixer.io. Europol states that the service was used to launder money that derived from weapons and drugs trafficking, credit card fraud, and ransomware and cyber-attacks.
Using a crypto-mixer is not illegal in the EU but hiding your origin of funds through a crypto-mixer can be illegal. Hosting and facilitating a crypto-mixer that is used to hide the provenance of illicit of funds is clearly illegal. The crypto-mixer Tornado Cash is banned in the EU after it was found it was used to launder funds for the North Korean regime.
Website Editor
Historian and Publisher
Leave a Reply