BTC mixers are working in overdrive in 2022 according to the latest research by Chainalysis and the largest address type sending crypto to mixers is the cybercriminals and the sanctioned nations so let’s read more today in our latest Bitcoin news.

Privacy advocates tour crypto mixers as an important way to protect the individual users’ identities as the reports from Chainalysis show with the largest portion of the crypto sent to mixers have been from cybercriminals and the sanctioned states:

“Illicit addresses account for 23% of funds sent to mixers so far in 2022, up from 12% in 2021.”

#PeckShieldAlert ~18k $ETH (~22m) into 0x1e…6430 from @harmonyprotocol exploiters pic.twitter.com/NN4j5Korsz

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) June 27, 2022

The company acknowledged that there are many legitimate reasons to use the mixers like trading crypto under oppressive governments or anonymizing legal and sensitive transactions:

“However, mixers’ core functionality, combined with the fact that they rarely, if ever, ask for KYC [Know Your Customer] information, makes them naturally attractive to cybercriminals.”

The tracking company says the mixers received more crypto in 2022 than ever before. Crypto mixers are services that allow users to erase the digital money trail that transactions leave on blockchain networks. These services make it harder to follow the trail that will be publicly accessible on the blockchain. As the name implied, mixers are also known as tumblers and they pool together crypto deposited by many users and they mix them so the users can receive funds from the obfuscated pool equivalent to what they put without the fees.

According to Chainalysis, BTC mixers are working now more than ever and they are classified as money transmitters in the US under the Bank Secrecy Act. Money transmitters are required to register with the FinCEN and to implement the anti-money laundering program so the company says it is unaware of the mixers following rules related to AML and KYC policies. The US authoriteis charged and sanctioned mixers in 2021 and in August, the CEO of Helix, Larry Harmon pleaded guilty to money laundering charges for laundering 354,468 BTC near $300 million at the same time. Harmon also operated the Coin Ninja mixing service and got a fine of $60 million.

The US Justice Department announced that it had cooperated with German Law enforcement to seize the Russian darknet site Hydra’s servers and the sanctioned site. The US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control issued the sanctions against crypto mixing Blender.io with connections North Korea in what the Treasury calls a first-of-its-kind situation. Cybercriminals sent $36 million in stolen ETH from Harmony Protocol’s Horizon bridge to the Tornado cash mixing service and at the same time, Chainalysis launched an incident response program that will assist the ones targeted by the hackers.