According to a statement from the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD), law enforcement officials in Amsterdam arrested an unnamed 29-year-old suspected of developing the ethereum mixing application Tornado Cash. FIOD accuses the suspect of “concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies.”
Netherlands Law Enforcement Takes Suspected Tornado Cash Dev Into Custody, Officials Hint About the Possibility of Future Arrests
Four days ago, the U.S. Treasury Department’s watchdog, the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), banned the ethereum mixing application Tornado Cash and 44 associated Ethereum-based addresses. Now Dutch law enforcement has revealed that FIOD has arrested a 29-year-old unidentified person that is accused of developing Tornado Cash. The press release published by the Dutch authorities notes that the suspect will be brought before a judge and further hints that “multiple arrests are not ruled out.”
Dutch investigators say that since 2019, Tornado Cash recorded a turnover of around $7 billion and law enforcement officials believe “at least one billion dollars’ worth of cryptocurrencies of criminal origin passed through the mixer.” The individual’s identity has not been disclosed by officials in Amsterdam but Dutch authorities stress that “advanced technologies, such as decentralised organisations” are getting extra attention from the FIOD if they are suspected of money laundering practices.
The FIOD press release adds:
It is suspected that persons behind this organisation have made large-scale profits from these transactions.
Suspect’s Arrest Follows Celebrity Dusting and Github Bans
The arrest follows the OFAC ban announcement that took place on August 8. “The following entity has been added to OFAC’s SDN list: Tornado Cash,” OFAC’s Cyber-related Designation report details. Then a couple of developers who had worked on the open source Tornado Cash codebase via Github got their accounts suspended, and some commits were erased from the software repository. Additionally, centralized crypto business operators like Circle froze addresses that were allegedly associated with OFAC’s Tornado Cash ban.
After the Github suspensions and assets were frozen, an unusual twist happened when an anonymous Tornado Cash user sent small fractions of ethereum (ETH), otherwise known as dusting, to a great number of celebrities and well…
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