In cryptocurrency There is often a thin line between financial privacy and money laundering. Now, a Bitcoin “mixing” service called Sinbad.io is working closely with the public: Just a few months after launching on the open web, it appears to have become the nation’s preferred means of money laundering. world’s richest- sponsored crypto thieves.
In part of it annual crime report published last weekBlockchain analytics firm Chainalysis noted that Sinbad—like other mixing services, proposes to thwart crypto tracing attempts by taking users’ crypto, mixing their coins with those of other users. other users and return the same amount—received $25 million in crypto stolen from North Korean hackers in December and January alone, more than any other mixing service has received .
According to Chainalysis, those funds include a portion of the money the thieves collected from major thefts targeting the Harmony Bridge service, from which North Koreans stole about 100 million dollarsas well as the Ronin Bridge service, from which hackers stole an amazing amount of $650 million. Chainalysis’s vice president of investigations, Erin Plante, said cybercriminals stealing North Korea’s cryptocurrency began transferring their profits bit by bit through Sinbad almost immediately after the launch of the mixer in October, in the hope of concealing the origin of their loot before withdrawing cash at an exchange. Sinbad “quickly caught the eye of the North Koreans and it became their favorite,” Plante said.
That puts the new service in an awkward position: Just a few weeks after its launch, Sinbad has become a publicly operated tool—with a traditional website that goes public alongside a dark web. on the Tor anonymous network—and some of the earliest high-volume users, most of which are also the crypto world’s most notorious cybercriminals. North Korean hackers, as found by Chainalysis, stole no less than $1.7 billion in cryptocurrency last year, making that year the year worst recorded in terms of total crypto thefts.
Meanwhile, the Sinbad founder argued in an email interview with WIRED that the service has no reason to hide. “Sinbad is in Clearnet because it doesn’t do anything bad,” the service’s creator and administrator, who claimed to be called “Mehdi”, uses the term “Clearnet” to refer to a website that doesn’t hidden on the Tor network.
Mehdi added: “I am against total surveillance, control of internet users, against tyranny and dictatorships. “Every living person has a right to privacy.”
Mehdi, who declined to reveal his real name or where he or Sinbad works, said that he created Sinbad as a response to the growing concentration of cryptocurrencies and Erosion of privacy promises it ever appeared to deliver. He named his mixer service after a fictional Middle Eastern sailor who, as Mehdi put it, “trades goods all over the world.” Mehdi describes Sinbad as a legitimate privacy-preserving technology project, comparing it to privacy-focused cryptocurrencies like Monero or Zcash, anonymity-enhancing crypto wallet software like Wasabi and the Tor browser encrypts user traffic and routes it through multiple servers to hide. people’s identities.
