FBI claims to have caught mastermind behind ChipMixer
A bitcoin mixer is something you’re probably already familiar with if you’re reading this blog. The idea is that you put your dirty bitcoin in, it gets all jumbled up in a cloud of transactions, and then it comes out squeaky clean. In theory the receiving wallet shouldn’t be easily traced back to the origin wallet. Our topic today involves an alleged operator of one such bitcoin mixer, called ChipMixer. As a law-abiding citizen, and someone who doesn’t have much need to hide how I’m spending my money, I don’t really have a need for services like that. If I was looking for a convenient way to launder crypto I would probably not use a mixer, as I don’t think it’s a great solution. Security through obscurity is no security at all, a theme which echoes through this case.
Alleged Offenses
Money Laundering, Operating An Unlicensed Money Transmitting Business, and Identity Theft.
Overview
The FBI is alleging that Vietnamese man Minh Quoc Nguyen is the mastermind behind bitcoin mixer ChipMixer. A third party analyst that they hired found that ChipMixer had been used to move over $3 billion in criminal proceeds. With that kind of moolah you definitely paint a target on your back for the feds, especially when you’re committing the heinous crime of Operating an Unlicensed Money Transmitting Business. In their criminal complaint the FBI accuses Nguyen of using Tor, crypto, and stolen identities in conjuction in order to hide his involvement in the illicit enterprise. If the government’s case is accurate, then Nguyen left a direct trail to his involvement in the case and obscured it in a cloud of stolen or fraudulent identities, hiding his movements much the way his bitcoin mixer hid his customer’s transactions. At first this worked, but it was only a matter of time before investigators managed to separate the signal from the noise and find Nguyen.
The investigation into ChipMixer had been ongoing for a while before investigators finally started to head down the right path. Previously they had seized the server for chipmixer.com, ChipMixer’s clearnet site, but this proved to be of little value because all this server did was redirect visitors to ChipMixer’s hidden service. Things finally started looking up for the feds when they figured out the IP address of a V3 onion server belonging to ChipMixer. A PayPal account linked to this server was conducting transactions with 12 different emails. 11 of the emails belonged to middle-aged people in the United States, some of which were deceased. The 12th was Nguyen. While it certainly seems like Nguyen is a good candidate at this point, here at Darkweb Dupes we believe that everyone is innocent until convicted (and even then we might still give you the benefit of the doubt.)
More pieces started falling into place once the FBI was suspicious of Nguyen. There’s a lot of claims in the criminal complaint based on the assumption that Nguyen wasn’t a victim of ID theft along with the rest of the 12 emails linked to the PayPal account in question. I’m not going to go into detail with these, as they’re assumptions of guilt and because anything involved would be derivative of the original fail: he used his personal email to pay for a server he was using to do naughty things.