European police agency Europol announced on Wednesday that it helped US and Germany took down the infrastructure of ChipMixer for its alleged involvement in money laundering.
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According to a press release, the agency alongside Belgium, Poland and Switzerland seized about 1909.4 BTC (EXANTE: Bitcoin) and 7 TB of data. Europol says ChipMixer made it attractive for bad actors to launder proceeds from criminal activities such as drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, ransomware attacks, and payment card fraud.
"Deposited funds would be turned into 'chips' (small tokens with equivalent value), which were then mixed together — thereby anonymizing all trails to where the initial funds originated," the agency said.
The police agency believes that ChipMixer laundered around 152,000 BTC, where a large share of the crypto came from darkweb markets, ransomware groups, illicit goods trafficking and procurement of child sexual exploitation material. Europol said that ransomware actors such as Zeppelin, SunCrypt, Mamba, Dharma or Lockbit had used the mixer service to launder ransom payments.
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