An anonymous service for crypto transactions that was shut down last year may be relaunched under a new name, blockchain analytics company Elliptic said in a blog post on Monday.
Blender.io’s wallet on the bitcoin and ethereum blockchains was put on the US sanctions list in May 2022 after it was discovered that the North Korean hacker group Lazarus had used the service to launder cybercrime proceeds. The US Treasury Department said that Lazarus was behind the infamous Ronin hack, when $625 million worth of crypto was stolen from the Blockchain Bridge protocol used by the popular NFT game Axi Infinity.
The hackers used cross-chain bridges and mixers to launder the proceeds of the hack, and Blender.io was one of them. Mixer ceased operations in April, but Elliptic said a similar service was launched in October, which received crypto from wallets linked to Blender.io and was also used by Lazarus.
Previously, Lazarus used Blender.io and Tornado Cash, another approved mixer whose developer Andrey Pertsev is now under arrest in the Netherlands. Elliptic said that unlike Blender.io, Tornado Cash is still operating, despite its addresses being on the Office of Foreign Control (OFAC) sanctions list. But Blender shut down and Sinbad seems to be taking its place, reads the blog.
North Korean hackers used Tornado Cash and Sinbad to launder stolen crypto from Horizon, another blockchain bridge that allows users to trade assets between the Harmony blockchain and other chains. Elliptic said that $100 million in crypto was stolen from Horizon in June, and part of it went to Sinbad.
Elliptic said there are indications that the same people may be behind Sinbad and Blender.io. For example, prior to the official launch of Sinbad, its wallet was deemed to be “controlled by the operator of Blender”. Elliptic suggested that the founders may have been testing the new service.
After the launch of Sinbad, most incoming transactions will come from a wallet linked to Blender.io, and Sinbad operators also reward promoters of the new mixer with a wallet linked to Blender.io. The two mixers had similar patterns of operation, Elliptic said, and both have Russian-language websites and technical support teams, meaning both may have roots in Russia or Russian-speaking countries.
Source: www.coindesk.com
