BestMixer is gone, seized by the Financial Crime Investigation

[operator55]

The most interesting thing is that there's no information about anyone arrested with the case.
Means the author is probably still here?

[gentlemand]

The most interesting thing is that there's no information about anyone arrested with the case.
Means the author is probably still here?

Maybe they're much more interested in the people who used the service than the people hosting it. It looks like they might have many of the details of the transactions that took place there. Stopping the service and draining it of info will have more of an impact but it is interesting how there's no mention of charges anywhere, or any names.

[TheNewAnon135246]

The most interesting thing is that there's no information about anyone arrested with the case.
Means the author is probably still here?

Maybe they're much more interested in the people who used the service than the people hosting it. It looks like they might have many of the details of the transactions that took place there. Stopping the service and draining it of info will have more of an impact but it is interesting how there's no mention of charges anywhere, or any names.

They don't release names, it's not the US. I bet they owners will get be investigated and will have to pay taxes on their earnings (if they aren't involved in criminal activities).

[gentlemand]

They don't release names, it's not the US. I bet they owners will get be investigated and will have to pay taxes on their earnings (if they aren't involved in criminal activities).

Possible. It's also possible they have the domain and servers but none of the people. If you were running a mixing service I'd hope at least you set that bit up anonymously. And if they're that shit a mixing service I hope they ran their earnings through another one too.

[operator55]

The most interesting thing is that there's no information about anyone arrested with the case.
Means the author is probably still here?

Maybe they're much more interested in the people who used the service than the people hosting it. It looks like they might have many of the details of the transactions that took place there. Stopping the service and draining it of info will have more of an impact but it is interesting how there's no mention of charges anywhere, or any names.

They don't release names, it's not the US. I bet they owners will get be investigated and will have to pay taxes on their earnings (if they aren't involved in criminal activities).

I'm not talking about releasing names. I know that they dont.

Usually, however, there's information when there was anyone arrested - with no names. Just read interpol announcements.

[PrimeNumber7]

The most interesting thing is that there's no information about anyone arrested with the case.
Means the author is probably still here?

Maybe they're much more interested in the people who used the service than the people hosting it. It looks like they might have many of the details of the transactions that took place there. Stopping the service and draining it of info will have more of an impact but it is interesting how there's no mention of charges anywhere, or any names.

They don't release names, it's not the US. I bet they owners will get be investigated and will have to pay taxes on their earnings (if they aren't involved in criminal activities).

I am not aware of any jurisdiction in which the government can seize a business if it is not alleged there is criminal activity.

The owners were most likely charged under seat last years, or their identities are unknown.

[illyiller]

The most interesting thing is that there's no information about anyone arrested with the case.
Means the author is probably still here?

According to media reports, no arrests have been made. Maybe the owners successfully obfuscated their identities when registering the site and operating the servers. Stranger things have happened.

I'm leaning towards the honeypot angle, myself. Nobody is stupid enough to run this service from the Netherlands.

Doesn't anyone remember what the Dutch police did with Hansa? They hijacked the market and ran it themselves, altering code and social engineering sellers into leaking their location and other identifying info.

In their probe into that free-trade zone, which would come to be known as Operation Bayonet, the Dutch investigators not only identified the two alleged administrators of Hansa's black market operation in Germany, but went so far as to hijack the two arrested men's accounts to take full control of the site itself.

'We thought maybe we could really damage the trust in this whole system.' -Marinus Boekelo, NHTCU

The NHTCU officers explained how, in the undercover work that followed, they surveilled Hansa's buyers and sellers, discreetly altered the site's code to grab more identifying information of those users, and even tricked dozens of Hansa's anonymous sellers into opening a beacon file on their computers that revealed their locations.

These Dutch police are ruthless and sneaky. I wouldn't put it past them to spin up the site themselves. Now they have a treasure chest of data on darknet smugglers. I'm sure many arrests will come from this. Probably none to do with operation of the mixer though.

[LeGaulois]

He registered the domain with Gandi and hosted the website with Worldstream . And I can tell you that you can buy a domain name without any real information and you can pay with bitcoins (at least before Bitcoin was here) the dedicated server too.

Today the Whois Record has been updated http://whois.domaintools.com/bestmixer.io but too lazy to find what changed. Probably the NS.

Look like they haven't moved yet the site to their own server, they're probably still working on few things like extracting or idk.

[figmentofmyass]

There is this post from another thread, I found it interesting. This is ambiguous but a mixer is truly legal up to a point. I guess if set up correctly the person behind is safe. They just have to shut up and take the money.. Could be interesting to check Bitmixer.io just out of curiousity

...So I stumbled upon this:

While cryptocurrency mixing services are legal, "The legality changes when a mixing service advertises itself as a success method to avoid various anti-money laundering policies via anonymity. This is actively offering a money laundering service," said Fokker.

So for as long as mixers don't show a faq as to why you should mix your coins (which Bestmixer had), they're perfectly legal? Or are there other factors at work here
...

what did bestmixer's FAQ actually say? did it literally say "use this service to launder your money"?

i'm not sure how the money laundering statutes work in europe. in the USA, the law (and associated conspiracy charges) requires an element of intent. from wikipedia:

Additionally, the law requires that an individual specifically intend in making the transaction to conceal the source, ownership or control of the funds.

advertising a service as a way to conceal the source of funds could be construed as conspiracy to launder money.

but if one runs a mixing service for privacy purposes only and doesn't advertise anything about money laundering, are they really in the clear? i dunno, sounds a bit too easy!

i always assumed the people running mixers would be doing so from some faraway island nation where they are safe from extradition treaties. so the worst thing they need to worry about is a domain seizure.

[TryNinja]

what did bestmixer's FAQ actually say? did it literally say "use this service to launder your money"?

The quote is huge so I’ll only link the post here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5099654.msg49639206#msg49639206

It’s funny because they explicitly said in their FAQ that they didn’t allow money coming from drugs and other illegal methods, which is exactly why they got shutdown. They were probably only trying to blind themselves from legal issues, but it didn’t work as we can see.

[PrimeNumber7]

CoinJoin

It is possible to de-anonymize CoinJoin transactions if the input/output sizes are not all the same. CJ will provide privacy from someone casually looking at your transaction, but not someone with some amount of resources.

The Dutch government claims to have been monitoring transactions going through their service for roughly a year. They also posted a message on the domain seizure message that says:

YOU ARE NOT ANONYMOUS

I don't think the purpose of this was to gather information about BestMixer's users, but was to inspire FUD for those who might use other mixing services.

It literally was the purpose, if not the end result. (See "Seized servers and transaction data captured") (You quoted it yourself? lol?)
They're investigating the data and sharing it with Interpol etc.

Do you know what percentage of the market BestMixer had? I don't, but I believe it was not a major player in the mixing market.

I believe the best way to maximize privacy is to not reuse bitcoin addresses, and encourage other people including the people you trade with to not reuse addresses. When someone uses a mixer, they will often get lazy, and when something like this happens, they will lose a lot of privacy they never really had. If you use bitcoin correct, and everyone else does so too, that is not reuse addresses, an adversary might use incomplete information and some assumptions to minimally break your privacy, but your overall privacy will be lower than it would be otherwise.

You're not making sense.
Not reusing adresses still don't break any cryptographic "chains" the link will only get broken if you use a mixer of sorts.

Anonymity is not necessarily improved when not reusing adresses....

Let me give this as an example:

Say I take out a loan from you, I give you an address to send the coins to. You are a very nice person and only require me to pay 95% of what I borrowed, and I repay 95% and send the remaining 5% to an address of my own. In all cases, brand new addresses are used for each transaction, and are not disclosed anywhere publicly. Looking from the outside, how would anyone know who owns any of the coins in either the address I repaid the loan to, or the change address I used to send the 5% to? Someone could tell the coins used to belong to you, but they cannot know if they belong to someone who traded with you, or if they belong to you without additional information.

[CryptoReggae]

I have a premonition, here there is more than someone who is literally doing himself under the shit out of fear
I expect great actions soon from the authorities, obviously among those who have used this service of unnecessary anonymity to launder illegal proceeds.

I try to imagine all those scam posts, malware (fake wallets). I have no doubt that many of these idiots have used this and other sponsored mixers on this forum.

[TryNinja]

Do you know what percentage of the market BestMixer had? I don't, but I believe it was not a major player in the mixing market.

The article says that they were among the top 3 mixers. So, pretty good volume and (probably) porcentage (75 BTC in fees/month).

Bestmixer.io is one of the three largest mixing services for cryptocurrencies and offered services for mixing the cryptocurrencies bitcoins, bitcoin cash and litecoins. The service started in May 2018 and achieved a turnover of at least $200 million (approx. 25,000 bitcoins) in a year’s time and guaranteed that the customers would remain anonymous.

Source: FIOD.nl article

[AdolfinWolf]

Say I take out a loan from you, I give you an address to send the coins to. You are a very nice person and only require me to pay 95% of what I borrowed, and I repay 95% and send the remaining 5% to an address of my own. In all cases, brand new addresses are used for each transaction, and are not disclosed anywhere publicly. Looking from the outside, how would anyone know who owns any of the coins in either the address I repaid the loan to, or the change address I used to send the 5% to? Someone could tell the coins used to belong to you, but they cannot know if they belong to someone who traded with you, or if they belong to you without additional information.

Perhaps they won't, but as soon as i transfer any portion of those coins (95%) to an exchange/or use it for X Y Z, it becomes clear that i owned all of them. hence why one might want to use a mixer before doing any sort of trading.

- I mean yes, you could let them sit in that adress for ever and it you can provably deny that they're yours, but you won't ever be able to do anything with them either without your privacy getting f'd.

- Cash out a portion of the coins -/ connects you to all of the coins.
- Buy something from shop X with btc -/ connects you to all of the coins.

I guess if you don't make a connection to any real world service or application, your argument could be validated. (but still isn't very strong..)

[klaaas]

The title makes me think about this tweet
Mobile. CoinJoin. Let that really sink in.

I guess this is the case with the posts above if i read it correct.
Samourai-Wallet points towards this function 'Stowaway' what is based on this concept [ I taint rich! (Raw txn fun and disrupting 'taint' analysis; >51kBTC linked!)

[PrimeNumber7]

Say I take out a loan from you, I give you an address to send the coins to. You are a very nice person and only require me to pay 95% of what I borrowed, and I repay 95% and send the remaining 5% to an address of my own. In all cases, brand new addresses are used for each transaction, and are not disclosed anywhere publicly. Looking from the outside, how would anyone know who owns any of the coins in either the address I repaid the loan to, or the change address I used to send the 5% to? Someone could tell the coins used to belong to you, but they cannot know if they belong to someone who traded with you, or if they belong to you without additional information.

Perhaps they won't, but as soon as i transfer any portion of those coins (95%) to an exchange/or use it for X Y Z, it becomes clear that i owned all of them. hence why one might want to use a mixer before doing any sort of trading.

- I mean yes, you could let them sit in that adress for ever and it you can provably deny that they're yours, but you won't ever be able to do anything with them either without your privacy getting f'd.

- Cash out a portion of the coins -/ connects you to all of the coins.
- Buy something from shop X with btc -/ connects you to all of the coins.

I guess if you don't make a connection to any real world service or application, your argument could be validated. (but still isn't very strong..)

Please see this article on address reuse and privacy:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse

Not reusing addresses absolutely increases privacy, and gives plausible deniability as to ownership of prior inputs that can be tracked back to bad/illegal activity.

[roosbit]

 

They don't release names, it's not the US. I bet they owners will get be investigated and will have to pay taxes on their earnings (if they aren't involved in criminal activities).

Even if it were the US of a mixers don't keep names....think about it. whose name will be there ?

if they aren't involved in criminal activities

Mixer....criminal activities....what are the odds of this not linked by some transaction somewhere? Besides the company operating in the lines of giving people their crypto privacy...and these guys could casually slap them with some money laundering charge

Possible. It's also possible they have the domain and servers but none of the people. If you were running a mixing service I'd hope at least you set that bit up anonymously. And if they're that shit a mixing service I hope they ran their earnings through another one too.

For a mixer to be shutdown this easily, something is not adding up!
I Wonder whose buttons got pressed for this to unravel....domain provider.....unsatisfied customer???

[xtests]

What really funny is actually a reaction of hero members that praised and prayed to bestmixer making of it a big example to other mixers.

This is what you basically get when you talk bullshit about other mixers.

[CryptopreneurBrainboss]

What really funny is actually a reaction of hero members that praised and prayed to bestmixer making of it a big example to other mixers.

This is what you basically get when you talk bullshit about other mixers.

So where are you heading with this statement of yours lol. The situation bestmixer currently find themselves in, has nothing to do with their downgrading of other mixers. it was just a business strategy they employed. Irrespective of whether your downgrade other mixer or not, if the government body have you under their radar they'll come for you.

[AdolfinWolf]

What really funny is actually a reaction of hero members that praised and prayed to bestmixer making of it a big example to other mixers.

This is what you basically get when you talk bullshit about other mixers.

So where are you heading with this statement of yours lol. The situation bestmixer currently find themselves in, has nothing to do with their downgrading of other mixers. it was just a business strategy they employed. Irrespective of whether your downgrade other mixer or not, if the government body have you under their radar they'll come for you.

It's still pretty ironic that they high horsed every other mixer for being "insecure", or not providing privacy, while their servers with (allegedly) full transaction data have been seized, (and were stored in Europe )

Already said this, but i get where xtests is coming from.

if the government body have you under their radar they'll come for you.

They mentioned two other mixers as well in the article where they talked about the seizure, and have they been raided yet?
Seems like they must be doing something better than Bestmixer..