European police close down cryptocurrency mixer that facilitated the laundering of 1.3 billion euros.

Europol Closes Cryptocurrency Laundering Service Cryptomixer

A group of law enforcement agencies led by Europol revealed on Monday that they have shut down the cryptocurrency laundering service known as Cryptomixer.

According to a press release from Europol, Cryptomixer was described as “the platform of choice for cybercriminals looking to launder illegal gains from various criminal activities, such as drug trafficking, arms trafficking, ransomware attacks, and payment card fraud.”

Since 2016, Europol indicated that crypto mixers have been involved in laundering around 1.3 billion euros (about $1.5 billion) in Bitcoin.

Criminals often rely on services like Cryptomixer to obscure the origin of their cryptocurrencies. Even though Bitcoin and Ethereum operate on public blockchains, which enable law enforcement and companies like Chainalysis and Elliptic to monitor transactions, these mixers complicate tracking efforts.

In the operation, authorities seized €25 million (approximately $29 million) in Bitcoin, alongside three servers and 12 terabytes of data, as well as the domain for the service. The website now displays a standard law enforcement seizure notice.

Europol noted that Cryptomixer played a significant role in hiding funds connected to ransomware groups, underground forums, and dark web markets, claiming that its software successfully obscured the traceability of funds on the blockchain.

Basically, the way it worked was that funds from various users were pooled together randomly before being sent to new addresses at unpredictable times. Since many digital currencies have a public ledger of all transactions, these mixing services make it much harder to trace specific currencies back to their source, effectively hiding their origins, according to Europol.

Cryptomixer provided its users with a level of anonymity, essentially allowing those looking to clean their cryptocurrencies before moving to legitimate exchanges to do so. Europol pointed out that these “purified” cryptocurrencies were then convertible to other cryptocurrencies or even fiat currencies.