April 26, 2024

Suspicious transactions are still being made in the Tornado Cash mixer

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Suspicious transactions are still being made in the Tornado Cash mixer

Despite sanctions from the US Treasury Department against the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer, suspicious movements of crypto assets are still taking place there.

At the beginning of August, the Tornado Cash service wasblocked by the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). However, suspicious transactions are still being made through Tornado Cash. Analysts from cybersecurity company CertiK reported a suspicious transfer of funds to Tornado Cash in the amount of $2.4 million. CertiK specialists suggested that these funds may be associated with a hack of the decentralized exchange BXH, during which hackers stole digital assets worth $139 million.

Was executed from a specific addressprivileged function for withdrawing funds from a staking contract on Binance Smart Chain and Avalanche. The crypto assets were then bridged to Ethereum, where ERC-20 tokens were exchanged for ETH. Thus, 1,865 ETH were transferred to the Tornado Cash service for a total amount of more than $2.4 million.

This is not the only such case.Recently, 500,000 DAI was entered into the mixer, which may be related to the hack of the crowdfunding platform DAO Maker, which suffered an attack last August. Due to an error in the DAO Maker smart contract, attackers were able to steal more than $7 million in stablecoins. The mixer was also used by another hacker who stole crypto assets from Ethereum users who generated human-readable names using the Profanity service. He transferred 732 ETH to Tornado Cash.

About two weeks ago, OFAC clarified thatBlocking Tornado Cash does not prohibit US citizens from copying and publishing the source code of the service. However, the department has not lifted the direct ban on the use of the mixer.