A crypto market investigation launched by the Wall Street Journal has discovered that more than $90 million worth of cryptocurrencies has been laundered through cryptocurrency exchanges based in the United States within the past two years.
As per the investigation, tens of millions of dollars’ worth of ill-gotten Bitcoin and a variety of other cryptocurrencies have been converted into the Monero privacy coin. This is via 46 cryptocurrency exchanges based in the United States. 2,500 crypto wallets were followed at the time of the course of the investigation and their transactions dating back to 2016 examined. Thus to improve the privacy while using altcoins that do not have complete secrecy, tumbling services are used, which play the role of clearing traces of the funds.
The investigation claims that the North Korean actors who unchecked the WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017 converted their illegal profits from bitcoin to Monero through ShapeShift. However, the CEO of Shapeshift stated that Wall Street Journal report showed an important misinterpretation of how cryptocurrency exchanges work and that the article’s claims were simply imprecise and unreliable.
The CEO added that ShapeShift has always obeyed with law enforcement requirements and has cooperated with authorities in over 30 surveys in more than 13 countries around the world, as reported on NAVMS.
In 2017, more than $266 million worth of crypto was actually laundered. However, 2018 figures are much higher at $761 million and this does not include transactions done using harder to track cryptocurrencies such as Dash, Zcash and Monero. As per the investigation, cryptocurrency tumbler services take digital currencies from a wide range of sources and mix them together in a combined pool.
As noted in DarkWeb News, in few of the countries, cryptocurrency exchange related crime is so widespread that security agencies have called for its regulation in a bid to decrease the associated. The use of discretion coins, on the other hand, have also augmented and so has the use of tumbling services. Starscape Capital had also fraudulently collected $ 2 million from investors, the other was KuCoin, an exchange based in Hong Kong. And so until today, none of the founders of such companies has ever been identified.
The post Tumbler Services Used To Abuse Cryptocurrency Exchanges to Launder Over $80 Million appeared first on OWLT Market.
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