The FBI, Europol and law enforcement agencies of several European countries stopped the operation of the ChipMixer cryptocurrency mixing service and seized bitcoins worth €44 million, the EU police service reported. The German and US authorities, with the support of the special services of Belgium, Poland and Switzerland, have disabled the platform’s infrastructure.
During the operation, four servers, 7 TB of data and 1.9 thousand bitcoins (€44.2 million) were confiscated. The platform’s website also no longer works, when switching to it, it is reported that the domain was seized by the FBI by a decision of an American court.
Cryptomixers are blockchain services that allow you to increase the confidentiality of transactions by hiding the connection between the source and recipient of tokens.
According to Europol, the ChipMixer service, created in mid-2017 to anonymize bitcoin flows, offered complete anonymity to its customers. Law enforcement agencies suggest that the cryptomixer was involved in money laundering and allowed users to hide traces of crimes such as drug or weapon trafficking, ransomware attacks and fraud. It is believed that the platform allowed to launder 152.000 BTC (about €2.73 billion), the report says.