Sinbad was used by North Korean cybercriminals to launder hundreds of millions stolen from some of the biggest cryptocurrency hacks such as Ronin Bridge and Atomic Wallet, the Treasury said.
The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced sanctions against Sinbad, a cryptocurrency mixing service allegedly leveraged by bad actors, including North Korea’s Lazarus Group, for money laundering. of digital assets.
Sinbad’s platform was used to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency looted from the biggest cryptocurrency exploits, such as the $600 million Axie Infinity Ronin bridge hack, the $100 billion Atomic Wallet breach, and Harmony Horizon’s $100 million loss, according to a Nov. 29 statement.
Due to OFAC sanctions, Sinbad’s website was shut down through a joint operation between the FBI, the Dutch Financial Intelligence and Investigation Service, and the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation.
Combining services that allow criminal actors, such as the Lazarus Group, to launder stolen assets will face serious consequences.
Wally Adeyemo, Undersecretary of the Treasury
The restrictions on Sinbad follow enforcement actions against other cryptocurrency mixers such as Blender.io on May 6, 2022 and Tornado Cash on November 8, 2022. The Tornado Cash case extended to its developers Alexey Pertsev, Roman Semenov and Roman Storm. The three co-founders face litigation in jurisdictions in the United States and the Netherlands.
Treasury departments, such as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, have also scrutinized cryptocurrency mixers, calling them a “threat to national security” and calling for stricter rules around monitoring these platforms.
This limits wide-ranging regulatory actions in the US against what the watchdog calls non-compliant crypto actors and lax procedures to combat misuse of their technology.
