CoinDeskPolicyPubblicato 2024-05-13Pubblicato ultima volta 2024-05-14

Introduzione

Alexey Pertsev was first jailed in the Netherlands in August 2022.

Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev has been found guilty of money laundering by a Dutch judge ruled at s-Hertogenbosch court on Tuesday.

An indictment shared ahead of the trial said that between July 9, 2019 and Aug. 10, 2022, Pertsev made "a habit of committing money laundering" and that he should have at least suspected the criminal origins of illicit transactions on the Tornado Cash platform.

The developer was first jailed in the Netherlands in August 2022 after Tornado Cash was blacklisted by the U.S government. At the time, the U.S. Treasury had alleged that Tornado Cash was a key tool for the North Korean hacking group Lazarus. The Lazarus Group has been tied to a $625 million hack of Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network and other major crypto thefts.

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The trial result could decide on future trials of other Tornado Cash developers. Other developers of the crypto mixer, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, also face allegations of money laundering and sanctions violations in the U.S. Storm will go to trial this September, but Semenov has not yet been arrested. Storm was arrested last year, after the U.S. again added Tornado Cash to its sanctions watchlist.

In the U.S., however, Storm is not accused of being responsible for the laundering of $1.2 billion due to differences in how U.S. and Dutch laws address personal responsibility in this type of alleged crime.

Edited by Nikhilesh De and Parikshit Mishra.

Letture associate

From Theft to Re-entry: How Was $292 Million "Laundered"?

A sophisticated crypto laundering operation was executed following the $292 million hack of Kelp DAO on April 18. The attack, attributed to the North Korean Lazarus group, began with anonymous infrastructure preparation using Tornado Cash to fund wallets untraceably. The hacker exploited a vulnerability in Kelp’s cross-chain bridge, stealing 116,500 rsETH. To avoid crashing the market, the attacker used Aave and Compound as laundering tools—depositing the stolen rsETH as collateral to borrow $190 million in clean, liquid ETH. This move triggered a bank run on Aave, causing an $8 billion drop in TVL. After consolidating funds, the attacker fragmented them across hundreds of wallets to evade detection. A major breakpoint was THORChain, where over $460 million in volume—30 times its usual activity—was processed in 24 hours, converting ETH into Bitcoin. This shift to Bitcoin’s UTXO model exponentially increased tracing complexity by shattering funds into countless untraceable fragments. The final destination was Tron-based USDT, the primary channel for illicit crypto flows. From there, funds were cashed out via OTC brokers in China and Southeast Asia, using unlicensed underground banks and UnionPay networks outside Western sanctions scope. Ultimately, the laundered money supports North Korea’s weapons programs, which rely heavily on crypto hacking for foreign currency. The incident underscores structural challenges in DeFi: its openness, composability, and lack of central control make such laundering not just possible, but inherently difficult to prevent.

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From Theft to Re-entry: How Was $292 Million "Laundered"?

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