Money laundering activities have recently been on the rise in the crytpo world yet again. Recent reports indicate that a huge sum was laundered through 46 separate cryptocurrency exchanges. About $90 million has been verified as laundered through criminal activity in total, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Authorities are working on the matter of tracking the lost money. The Wall Street Journal further reveals that it has already managed to track funds from quite a significant number of crypto wallet addresses. These addresses, all of them associated with criminal activity, are said to have lost about $88.6 million. Over the past two years, criminals have laundered almost $9 million through ShapeShift alone, the crypto coin exchange service.
These criminals worked in an organized way, and tracking their network helped authorities in tracing the funds. These investigators kept a close look at the various wallet addresses and transactions on the Ethereum bloackchain to KuCoin and ShapeShift.
ShapeShift now finds itself in a major controversy. Reports show it to be one of the biggest recipients of illicit funds. The large number of offices that it has in the U.S saw it process almost $9 million in laundered funds. That was out of the total sum amounting to about $88 million within a timeframe of about two years.
Most noteworthy, there is evidence showing that these criminals had been using ShapeShift in their activities of exchanging Bitcoin for Monero. South Korea is one of the countries with quite a significant number of hackers on this front. These hackers were associated with the WannaCry ransomware attack. They managed to get away with millions of dollars from businesses and governments as well.
The police can only go as far as tracking transactions. However, they can’t tell who the specific users that conducted the transactions were, hence the appeal of crypto anonymity.
One official opined, “Even spoofers who robbed ShapeShift’s own would-be customers by setting up a copycat ShapeShift website that stole their money used the real ShapeShift to launder their funds.”
