The Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US Treasury Department (OFAC) has included the website of the cryptocurrency mixer Sinbad in the list of sanctions, accusing the platform of laundering funds received by the hacker group Lazarus.
OFAC, in its statement published on November 29, claims that Sinbad processed millions of dollars in virtual currencies received as a result of hacker attacks. These attacks include the Horizon Bridge hacks in June 2022, Axie Infinity's Ronin Bridge in March 2022 and Atomic Wallet in June 2023, which resulted in the loss of funds by owners and users in the amount of about $850 million.
Wally Adeyemo, deputy finance minister, noted that mixing services such as Sinbad, which allow criminal organizations, including Lazarus Group, to launder stolen assets, will face serious consequences. He stressed the readiness of the Ministry of Finance and its partners in the US government to use all available tools to curb the illegal activities of virtual currency mixers such as Sinbad.
The Sinbad mixer provides users with the ability to mix and mix digital assets, thereby ensuring privacy and anonymity of transactions. To protect funds from tracking, the platform uses modern encryption algorithms and a decentralized architecture.
Earlier, in August last year, OFAC added the website of the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer to the sanctions list, as well as 39 Ethereum addresses and 6 USDC addresses associated with it. OFAC stated that since the launch of Tornado Cash in 2019, cryptocurrencies worth more than $7 billion have been laundered through it. At the same time, more than $455 million of this amount is associated with the activities of the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group.
In addition, Tornado Cash was used to launder funds received by criminals as a result of the robbery of the Harmony network in June 2022 in the amount of more than $96 million. The service was also involved in laundering $7.8 million stolen as a result of hacking the Nomad cross-chain protocol in early August.
One of the developers of Tornado Cash, Alexey Pertsev, was arrested in Amsterdam and is accused of participating in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through mixing cryptocurrencies using the decentralized Tornado Cash service.
In August of this year, the US government filed charges and arrested the founders of the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer, including Roman Storm and Roman Semenov. They are charged with laundering more than $1 billion dollars and violating sanctions, as well as conspirin
