Money Laundering Operations?

[hta]

Is this a form of money laundering? Or is it a mistake? Can anyone explain clearly for me? There are up to 3 such deals.

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x1f73b43dc9c48cc131a931fac7095de9e5eba0c5184ec0c5c5f1f32efa2a6bab
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x464e50e8ade15ad883f80fd173f6afd85efdf15413892625fe0146fbe5fecd92
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x5691ddae752652bd579da5b45e84d5b90ae35acce5cbd308a1574c31f722608f

[1715698796]

1715698796

[1715698796]

1715698796

[1715698796]

1715698796

[1715698796]

1715698796

[JeromeTash]

I doubt if its money laundering as there are so many mining pools involved.
There are so many theories but i will just drop this here
- ETH's High Transaction Fee Might Be an Activity to Thank the Miners on the Lantern Festival
- Ethereum Mining Pool Receives Mysterious $300K Blockchain Payout
- https://old.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/asabcz/insanely_high_tx_fees_from_one_address/

Be the judge.

[socks435]

Never seen any transaction like this before this one https://etherscan.io/tx/0x1f73b43dc9c48cc131a931fac7095de9e5eba0c5184ec0c5c5f1f32efa2a6bab
It seems the miners fee is too high and only sending 0.1 Ether which is too low compared to miners fee.

It looks like a free rewards to miners who lucky get this miners fee. Did you read the comments from that address from here https://etherscan.io/tx/0x1f73b43dc9c48cc131a931fac7095de9e5eba0c5184ec0c5c5f1f32efa2a6bab#comments

Or maybe the sender accidentally sent 0.1 ETH with 2100 ETH miners fee? It's mostly happen to other's including me due to lack of knowledge how the gas fee works.

[JeromeTash]

Or maybe the sender accidentally sent 0.1 ETH with 2100 ETH miners fee? It's mostly happen to other's including me due to lack of knowledge how the gas fee works.

I don't think it was a mistake.

Code:

Size: 34,690 bytes
Gas Used: 7,987,602 (99.84%)
Gas Limit: 8,000,029

It was intentional.
Look at the gas limit, Who sets that kind of gas limit to just send ether(it's usually 21,000)?  
and look at the gas used... my belief is that it was either a glitch or someone intentionally decided to reward(very likely)

[figmentofmyass]

Or maybe the sender accidentally sent 0.1 ETH with 2100 ETH miners fee? It's mostly happen to other's including me due to lack of knowledge how the gas fee works.

I don't think it was a mistake.

Code:

Size: 34,690 bytes
Gas Used: 7,987,602 (99.84%)
Gas Limit: 8,000,029

It was intentional.
Look at the gas limit, Who sets that kind of gas limit to just send ether(it's usually 21,000)?  
and look at the gas used... my belief is that it was either a glitch or someone intentionally decided to reward(very likely)

the gas limit is what makes it look like a mistake. there have been cases like this before with bitcoin caused by badly coded wallet software or mixing software. what makes you think it was intentional?

some more discussion here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5111978.0;all

[JeromeTash]

the gas limit is what makes it look like a mistake. there have been cases like this before with bitcoin caused by badly coded wallet software or mixing software. what makes you think it was intentional?

some more discussion here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5111978.0;all

It's good that you bought up the thread.
Look at the timeline of the abnormal transactions again.



1. What kind of stupid person would make 5 mistakes one after the other?
2. If it's an error from a badly coded wallet software then we would have far more similar transaction than just 5, I looked at the address and it seems to be sending out so many transactions.

Yup, that's why I think it's intention. Ether gas limit is 21000 by default

[Kopyleft]

Yup, that's why I think it's intention. Ether gas limit is 21000 by default

I also think it's intentional, firstly, the amount being sent is such a small amount, and that coming from a wallet which holds such a high amount of ETH does not sit well. And then there's a trail of transactions. Also it's unlikely that's it's a noob making those transactions.
Could it be a way of avoiding taxation or some other legal procedures?

[Ipwich]

That's a huge transaction fee involved, but first you need to determine what is the meaning of Money Laundering as we cannot
determine it by simply looking at the transactions.

Per definition by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering

Money laundering is the process of concealing the origins of money obtained illegally by passing it through a complex sequence of banking transfers or commercial transactions

We have to established first if this user is involve in illegal activities or suspected with illegal activities and I guess only authorities would know that as things are pretty confidential between agencies who will do the reporting. AFAIR when I was still with a bank, we send AMLA reports through encrypted email.

[Velkro]

It seems the miners fee is too high and only sending 0.1 Ether which is too low compared to miners fee.

Which should never be allowed on software level. This errors costs people so much money since years and its all because incompetence of programmers that forgot to give one line of code if fee > than payment show error or at least confirmation box. Simple as that.
I would bet that 90% of this type of transaction would be eliminated.

[dothebeats]

It seems the miners fee is too high and only sending 0.1 Ether which is too low compared to miners fee.

Which should never be allowed on software level. This errors costs people so much money since years and its all because incompetence of programmers that forgot to give one line of code if fee > than payment show error or at least confirmation box. Simple as that.
I would bet that 90% of this type of transaction would be eliminated.

But the way these transactions are sent and on the manner of them being sent seems to be not a human error. Who would send these transactions without even knowing the mistake they did? Though this may not really look like money laundering at all considering that there would be a lot of miners fighting for the next block, this is still too shady and somewhat fishy to say the least. As for your comment regarding software wallets, I agree, there should be an implementation wherein a certain limit on fees is imposed to avoid situations such as this.

[DdmrDdmr]

The hypothesis now are more inclined for it to be an "automated bot that went wrong". In the meantime, Sparkpool has frozen the payout and is giving the TX sender a chance to contact them to find a reasonable solution (see https://www.coindesk.com/sparkpool-to-freeze-mysterious-2100-ether-mining-payout-for-now).

The other four high fee TXs from the same origin were paid out to Nanopool and Ethermine, who yet have to make a pronouncement on the matter.

[CryptopreneurBrainboss]

I didn't know similar thread has already been started on this board. i also saw the transactions and had asked same question on the mining board titled, Are miners laundering money or these are honest mistakes by senders. thinking it was also money laundering but just as DdmrDdmr has started "the automatic bot went wrong" could be the closest answer to the mysterious extremely high transaction fee or maybe  Nanopool and Ethermine are playing with the ethereum blockchain lol .

[mrdeposit]

Very interesting. In 1 day, how could there be so much coincidence? So it is not understanding or anything else. The newbies who did not know about MEW they found the same day to try gas? I suppose there is something we do not know about.

[Crypto Girl]

And so as of now the sender still don't reach out, looks like he didn't knew that something happened and still don't check his balance.
What if other miners had mined this, will they willing to return this to the sender like what Sparkpool will do. It's unlikely tho.
On the other hand, why people calling this money laundering? I mean if someone will intentionally increase the gas, how sure they are that the "gas" will fall on their address or in short what if other mine it first? 

[shasan]

Sparkpool Splits the 2100 ETH with Accidental Sender

Remember the news when someone got rekt after sending 2100 ETH in mining fee?

Ethereum mining pool Sparkpool has verified the accidental sender of and agreed to split the amount.

In a message embedded in a transaction, the sender thanked Sparkpool for their integrity and agreed with the amount split.

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/sparkpool-splits-2100-ether-mining-fee-with-accidental-sender You can see the details on the link of the source.

[RapTarX]

What types of money laundering you are refering to? Observing all the posts and articles provided by other people, it seems to be an accident at most case or a gift to the miners.

[zhekinsp]

What types of money laundering you are refering to? Observing all the posts and articles provided by other people, it seems to be an accident at most case or a gift to the miners.

Those transactions were made intentionally to make their funds to be on someone's hands ( people who initiating the transactions know exactly who is going to get that reward).So they are just making their money to be lost and then get it in some other way.

[BrewMaster]

[..]

1. What kind of stupid person would make 5 mistakes one after the other?
2. If it's an error from a badly coded wallet software then we would have far more similar transaction than just 5, I looked at the address and it seems to be sending out so many transactions.

Yup, that's why I think it's intention. Ether gas limit is 21000 by default

you can't really jump to that kind of conclusion without knowing what software he was using and also checking its source code to see what really happened. for all we know this is a bug in an automatic service script or something like that which had a bug that occured on certain cases which we saw in these transactions, the owner has probably caught the error by now and has fixed it.

(it wouldn't be the first time something like this happens).

[khaled0111]

The mystery is finally revealed. It was not a money laundering, it was a mistake.
The sender, owner of the 0x587ecf600d304f831201c30ea0845118dd57516e address, is a Korean company made a mistake and set the gas fee too high (don't know how this happened).

They contacted Sparkpool and confirmed they are the owner of that address and asked for refund.
They came to an agreement to split it and each one gets 1050ETH.

This is the input data in a transaction from the victim:

Thank you SparkPool and your miners for helping us to recover our loss, we are willing to share half of 2100 ETH with the miners to thanks the miners' integrity.

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7b53c4f08f59d2218c20a05069cb99914cacb8d57ef451c0b6ed8b1b4099db4e

For more details:
https://www.odaily.com/post/5136465