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April 6, 2022 02:02 pm

Hackers Stole More Than $600 Million in Crypto. Laundering It Is the Tricky Part.

Thieves netting massive sums in cybercrime have limited options for laundering the funds. From a report: Many eyes in the crypto world are on a 42-character address on the Ethereum blockchain, which has unclear ownership and is currently home to the equivalent of about $600 million. Hackers stole the funds from players of online game "Axie Infinity" in a March 23 heist uncovered last week. The criminals have moved millions of dollars of assets in recent days, according to blockchain-monitoring tools, but the majority of funds remain in place, leaving victims and outside observers awaiting next moves. Crypto's transparency has turned money laundering into a perverse spectator sport. Transaction records on public blockchains give authorities a bird's-eye view of stolen funds equivalent to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, often pilfered by targeting poorly secured software bridges that transfer assets between blockchains. The openness leaves successful cyber thieves facing a key question: How do you launder a nine-figure score? "When there's a hack like that, everyone is watching the wallets," said Kimberly Grauer, director of research at Chainalysis, a blockchain-analytics firm. "So you better damn well know what you're going to do." The fate of the money stolen from "Axie Infinity" users, one of the largest such thefts, has become a topic of speculation. On Etherscan, a monitoring platform where users can see transactions to and from the address in question, commenters claiming to be victims, broke college students or Ukrainian refugees have posted messages asking the hackers to spread their newfound wealth. [...] Last week, blockchain analysts and amateur digital sleuths watched as ether worth about $20 million moved to crypto exchanges based in the Bahamas and Seychelles. On Monday, an additional $12 million of assets flowed into a mixer, which blends different cryptocurrencies to help obscure their sources. Mixers can have their own security compromises and are dependent on having enough crypto on hand to exchange illicit deposits for cleaner funds, said Mitchell Amador, chief executive of Immunefi, a bug-bounty platform focused on decentralized systems.

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