Massive Cryptocurrency Tumbler Service Closed Down By The Europol

Have you heard of cryptocurrency mixing? Well, if you do, then you are aware of what a grave crime it is in the crypto circle. It is essentially laundering of crypto currency.

In case you don’t, a cryptocurrency mixing service allows one to transform transactions of non-private coins to private ones by mixing around crypto funds with others. This provides anonymity to the transaction trail and makes it very difficult to track the funds’ original source.

A very recent bust conducted by Dutch, Luxembourg authorities along with Europol, has successfully compromised a $200 million dollar operation of one of the three largest cryptocurrency tumblers.

The investigation has been ongoing since June 2018 and was being headed by the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD) . The report states that the FIOD has now seized six servers of Bestmixer.io, a major crypto mixing service.

As of now, the FIOD along with Europol and Luxembourg authorities, have banned the platform, since they discovered large number of mixed coins on Bestmixer could be linked to criminal activity. They were being used for money laundering or illegal financing.

The service had a reported turnover of at least $200 million May 2018, which was the month of its launch. The service can be counted amongst the three largest mixing services for cryptocurrencies including bitcoin (BTC), litecoin (LTC), bitcoin cash (BCH) and others.

The FIOD now has enough evidence to implicate the company, owing to all the data that it collected regarding the transactions on the platform in the past year, which include messages, bitcoin addresses, IP-addresses and more.

Bestmixer’s closure, marks the first such legal enforcement action, against a crypto mixing service. The authority is planning to analyze all the data that it has seized, and share the results with other countries, noted Europol. This signals the beginning of a systematic crackdown on such services in the future.