Bitcoin Forum

Jollygood talked about the Lazarus Group  on a thread: After Chipmixer, Is Sinbad.io Next To Be Shutdown? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5454407.msg62321674#msg62321674)

The mixer is Sinbad. We all know the mixer call Sinbad.

Elliptic is a blockchain compliance analytics firm that investigate about the $35 million that was known to have been stolen from Atomic wallet user. The money or probably some of the money was first convert to bitcoin and sent to Sinbad for mixing.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/atomic-wallet-hacker-sends-crypto-mixer-elliptic

Seems to me that it's going to be a bad day for Sinbad.io and the people that's promoting them with campaign signatures. But I guess, if it hits a rogue nation's hacker group that provides funds for the rogue state, the sacrifice is hopefully worth it. I'm having mixed feelings with mixers now, I think that it's a freedom to be able to use it but then group's like the Lazarus group using it makes me want to change sides.

Sorry for the stupid question, but how did they manage to determine that this money went to the blender? I remember when I read about the reason for the confiscation of Khaled, they had told that money went to that mixer, but how could they determine the mixer to which those money went?

There is a lawsuit against Blender due to which that mixer stopped and Sanctioned Mixer Blender Re-Launched as Sinbad (https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/02/13/sanctioned-mixer-blender-re-launched-as-sinbad-elliptic-says/) so we will see that soon.
If they are from North Korea, the United States will not be able to sized the domain, and therefore whenever suspicions revolve around them, all they will do is move to a new domain name.

I've read their report here and can't find solid evidence on how to know the coins were sent to that mixer.

https://hub.elliptic.co/analysis/has-a-sanctioned-bitcoin-mixer-been-resurrected-to-aid-north-korea-s-lazarus-group/

But I found this

Good luck to the Atomic wallet team trying to recover the funds once they go through a mixer. Maybe they should look at the point of conversion of alts to Bitcoin that is, if they used any centralized exchange, but I doubt if those hackers were that dumb.

Bad as in how?

Then you should have mixed feelings about the dollar, the banks and all those Government back financial institutions because they have been used to launder money for decades by bad actors and in some cases the Governments just look the other side because it's "big" people within them that are involved

How are both situations any different?

he is probably thinking that Sinbad.io will suffer the same fate as Chipmixer, which will affect the signature campaign participants when the campaign closes(just like what happened to Chipmixer's campaign) because Sinbad.io is seized by the authorities.

anyway, I am curious, I haven't really read up on the atomic wallet hack, but how was it really hacked? I mean, did the hackers find a vulnerability in their system(or something) that gave them access to a bunch of atomic wallets or what?

The question is, will the atomic wallet users get their money back because just a portion of that fund is traced to a mixer what about those that have been filtered into various other coins and currencies, I guest there is no form of insurance to cover this and is going to take a long time and process trying to get the mixed bitcoin back even if the mixers the hackers used is cracked down which is not something that can easily come by.

First, I believe that the appropriate board for this topic is not Reputation, but Service Discussion.


Are there any mixers that will get rid of this? By their nature, apart from serving privacy-conscious people, mixers will also attract scammers who want to launder money. Or is there a mixer that is going to reject funds for mixing because they are "tainted"? I don't think so.

Didn't you read the article? It clearly said that Sinbad was involved in the laundering of millions of dollars for the hacker group. I don't see how it can be good for Sinbad.io this news is but you clearly know what you're talking about.
Why would I have a mixed feelings with the dollar? It's not the currency that I use although I know how influential it is to my local currency. The way I see it, they're difference is that there's a way to trace the dollar if it's laundered compared to a mixer. Don't act big just because I have mixed feelings about mixers by mentioning something unrelated to the topic.

They keep dodging the bullet whenever they are asked about this, claiming that they are investigation, but the hack could be arsing from a vulnerability in the wallet software or perhaps an insider job.

They have 2 full paragraphs about this in their terms of service, (https://atomicwallet.io/terms-of-service) and they are even in UPPER CASE  ;D. It will be interesting to see how they will handle this issue.



Of course i read it even before today, you think I am dumb enough to comment without reading?


This is why I exactly gave you the example of the dollar but looks like you don't even get any point. If Sinbad was involved in the laundering of millions of dollars for the hacker group. Then shouldn't you be crucifying your glorious financial institutions, fiat currencies as well that have "facilitated" money laundering for decades?

Besides, Bestmixer was seized, Bitblender stopped operation, Chipmixer was seized. Did any signature participant here die or suffer damages as a result?
You make it look like it's going to be some sort of dooms day, lol. I guess according to you, they must be shitting in their pants right now.

Bingo

The point is it has been used to launder money before, and it's still being used to this date. How do you think corrupt leaders, Rebels, terrorist move their money in and from fragile states to offshore accounts and Shell corporations?

If you don't understand anything. There is no need to feel bad about it.

OP, no offense, but you should stop reading third-rate news portals that produce clickbait headlines, and their whole story boils down to mere speculation involving some kind of blockchain-spying company. Does it even matter through which mixer those funds went through (if they did at all), and who says they didn't use some other mixer as well?

---

The OP (as well as some others) obviously think that topics like this are appropriate for the Reputation board, although it would be more appropriate to post them elsewhere. Insinuations that some mixer laundered funds from this or that hack are completely meaningless, especially if we know that no mixer has a blacklist and does not limit coins that may come from suspicious sources or are connected to illegal activities.

A close source wallet getting hacked! Don't you guys smell something wrong here. I am suspecting an insider hacking and something that I have already mentioned a few days back here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5455030.msg62352853#msg62352853). I am suspecting the owners of Atomic wallet and they need to be investigated. After this news the stolen funds cannot be recovered. Will Atomic wallet payback it's users or will they file for bankruptcy? We all need to wait and watch.

After reading the article, I believe there is indeed some connection between Sinbad crypto tumbler and Blender because they just shut down then which means they upgrade their mechanism in other to be invisible. However, I am curious about the confidence the creator of the crypto tumbler had when he said "he remains relatively confident about his own fate."
In the meantime, I see the crypto tumbler as the next to be shut down by the Feds.

Some of this news are mere speculation and guesswork because the process of investigation is not clear or revealed. It could also be a smear campaign against a mixer just to give them a bad name and grab some portion of their market. The truth is no mixer is a saint because none of them will enquire where their client got the funds they want to mix. The government can sanction any mixer because they all offer the same service. We can only predict the mixer that the government will seize but we have to be patient to actually know the next.

That's BS news. The lizardmen are going to abuse just about any mixer they can get their hands on in order to launder their money, so why should association with them mean that the mixers should get shutdown?

What about all the exchanges which enable the withdrawals to take place?

And the shadow Paypal accounts and other payment apps?

And the banks turning a blind eye to their deposits?

People should look at the whole picture, else we will soon live in a world where it would not be viewed as draconian to say something like "Linux enables privacy therefore it is only for criminals, because privacy = crime".  :o

Meh, I guess once again it proves criminals are lazy even in the amount of millions it's just time and effort to make it anonymous instead of going through a centralized mixer or exchange.

As for being seized or shut down or anything else. Makes you wonder how long it would take. CM ran for years, so it might take that long. Or it could be weeks / days.

But, not something I would worry about either way. If it happens, then others will pop up to take their place.

-Dave

It won't be long. Feds can get other countries to do their bidding as well ofc.. The almighty dollar persists... But.. For how long is the real question? History says... well... should be ded already. :P

It depends on the mixer manager's fear and the extent of his feeling that the police may knock his door or initiate a lawsuit against him, or is in a country that can extradite wanted persons to the United States, all factors that may suddenly make the mixer owner decide to leave and stop providing the service The lagest Bitcoin mixer is about to stop working (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2042470.0).

They have a large line in the terms of use that avoids the legal issue, so it is possible that one of the developers knew some backdoors and suddenly decided to collect the free money for his pocket. Here lies the danger of these closed-source wallets in the fact that you trust a developer who can withdraw your money and you cannot make any legally thing.

I don't like to say it but leaving your money in a CEX exchange may be better than using a closed source wallet.

Oh wow. Do you consider Cointelegraph as a third-rate news portal? I used to read Coindesk, Cointelegraph and BitcoinMagazine for crypto news. It doesn't really matter what mixer is used by those hackers! But it matters for the Mixer platform. Believe it or not, The Governs rely on those reports and start an investigation. If the allegation is true that Sinbad is Blender.io, If the U.S. Treasury Department were able to seize Blender.io, wouldn't they will be able to seize Sinbad too? Nobody knows if those hackers used other mixers as well. But, You cannot blame a news portal for not knowing that. They just reported what they know so far.

Maybe service discussion? Because both Mixer and Atomic Wallet are services. Maybe this could fit better in the Service discussion section. Or, you may want to suggest where it fits best!


Huh? I thought only exchanges could be centralized. How the heck can a mixer be centralized?

I think I was clear about that, and many others agreed with that as we fought against those who shill their links on this forum and were paid for it. Not only do they try to make a sensation out of every senseless news, but they built their reputation in a very dirty way. I put them on my blacklist a long time ago, although I don't expect others to do the same.

OP, _act_ if you follow this discussion that you started, you will see that almost everyone suggests that you move this topic from the reputation section to the service discussion. I'm not sure why you associate things like this with reputation, I guess because of signature campaigns. You should understand that any service does not exist to have its own signature campaign, but it is only part of its promotion.

I really don't know how many times we will return to the story about the responsibility of any mixer for the origin of the bitcoins that come to it.
Now I see the "confession" of a victim of the Atomic wallet hack, where he says that his wallet has been emptied, but the funds have not yet been transferred. Are they the same Lazarus Group hackers? What if those funds go through another mixer, how will we position ourselves in that case?
Will Cointelegraph and Elliptics make special analyses, or are such amounts of only 1BTC not interesting to them because they are not sensational enough?


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/06/07/w7sOI.jpeg

source: https://twitter.com/Thomas_Hunter11/status/1666054742412345345?s=20

Are you suggesting mixers to start hiring government agencies to approve the coins coming in to them then mix the coins of their clients?

Just because a random Blockchain analysis company claims something is gray does not mean it is gray. Blockchain is open for everyone to trace transactions. Why don't they show the transaction reports, the connections, destination addresses everything publicly? They will not do such thing because they may not have concrete conclusion.

How did they even know it ended to address/es that is/are from Sinbad wallet?

Sinbad is the most popular wallet at the moment, it's understandable that they have more clients than other mixers existing right now. So raising a finger to them is easyer than anyone else.

But let's be real, today or tomorrow every mixers will be blamed for something even if they are not guilty.

They don't say an exchange did this/that because exchanges don't care for their clients privacy.

Because you send crypto to it and they send it back and it's under the control of one person / company. Much like sinbad / whirlwind and a host of others.

Then you have things like joinmarket where everyone runs their own node which handles the coinjoins with others.
https://github.com/JoinMarket-Org/joinmarket-clientserver

So had they run their own node, and then slowly trickled the coins in it would be impossible to prove anything.

-Dave

Obviously not. They're just saying this will lead to greater scrutiny for them which could eventually lead to their shutdown, ala ChipMixer.


The difference between them and a random person commenting on this forum is the claims they make are backed by enough evidence to hold up in court. They can withstand scrutiny from an analysis team hired by a defense attorney trying their hardest to poke holes in their findings.


I would imagine by sending BTC there and tracing where its going. Also there could be instances when BTC was known to have come from Sinbad and they trace it back to its origins.

Remember that just because a mixer claims to have certain procedures or security measures in place, it doesn't mean they actually do (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1935098.msg61925328#msg61925328).

Could using a mixer be actually safe hundred percent considering this which has to do with the privacy itself and the fact that they are centralized, are we not going in search for help where help is also needed, maybe the best way is to learn this thing once and for all and know how to run a full node using bitcoincore and get this software over Tor client, here maximum privacy is guaranteed than going through a third party to secure one, my view anyway on this, maybe there could be more clarity to that in addition.

The lizardmen do not need mixers or the cryptospace to launder their money. They have traditional banking and finance to do it for them. The difference is the lizardmen are the only people who have access to the moneylaundering function of traditional finance hehehehe. Small minnows like us do not have the income bracket to be included in their group.

However there is good news, the usage of the cryptospace for moneylaundering is open to all individuals. The lizardmen and the leaders in traditional finance do not like this. The lizardmen do not want the small minnows to have the same superpowers as them and the leaders of traditional finance do not like competition in their moneylaundering business. For that reason, the lizardmen are now presently using their people in the government to attack and crackdown on crypto.

The lizardmen also use their people in mainstream news media to write head shaking articles similar to this.



Axie Infinity

If I told you that US venture capitalists promoted a Ponzi scheme that used a cartoon computer game to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from poor workers in the Philippines and send it to North Korea to fund a ballistic missile program, you probably wouldn’t believe me. Unless I said “… using crypto,” in which case you would probably say “oh yeah that sounds about right.” The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend.

Last year an engineer working for the blockchain gaming company Sky Mavis thought he was on the cusp of a new job that would pay more money.

A recruiter had reached out to him via LinkedIn, and after the two spoke over the phone, the r
ecruiter gave the engineer a document to review as part of the interview process.
But the recruiter was part of a vast North Korean operation aimed at bringing in funds to the cash-poor dictatorship. And the document was a Trojan Horse, malicious computer code that gave the North Koreans access to the engineer’s computer and allowed hackers to break into Sky Mavis. Ultimately they stole more than $600 million—mostly from players of Sky Mavis’s digital pets game, Axie Infinity.

It was the country’s biggest haul in five years of digital heists that have netted more than $3 billion for the North Koreans, according to the blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. That money is being used to fund about 50% of North Korea’s ballistic missile program, U.S. officials say, which has been developed in tandem with its nuclear weapons.

Super! Venture capitalists have largely pivoted from crypto to artificial intelligence, and while the popular view is that AI has a higher probability of wiping out humanity than crypto does, “crypto funds the North Korean missile program” would be a funny way for crypto to kill us all before a rogue AI can.

Source https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-06-12/three-arrows-had-a-fun-bubble

Nice rythme in this :)

On a serious note, you know how everyone say no pain no gain or no risk no gain...Whatever is coming is the cost of doing business,  it's the nature of business!

Did not see this coming, and since when did things get to pinned on promoters (individuals )of a service ??

And in the years I have been on the forum I have never read a thread saying signature participants will be jointly liable for whatever comes out from a seizure or whatever it is....this has never happened or won't happen, otherthan sig ending and we all move on.

Mixers can't regulated businesses and they don't mind crossing the red tape as the clients are special clientele wanting  to protect their digital footprint and the alike.