The German police claim to have seized tens of millions of euros and server infrastructure associated with notorious crypto-swapping service exchange.
The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) said in a statement that the trek of € 34 million ($ 38 million) Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin and Dash was the third largest in its history.
Available on the surface and the dark web, users were able to exchange cryptocurrencies for others, and was therefore preferred by cyber criminals and money washer, who appreciated the anonymity that the users promised.
It is believed that at least $ 1.9 billion in Crypto assets had been washed by the platform since it was launched in 2014, including some of the funds stolen by Noord -Korea from Bybit in the world’s largest crypto robbery so far.
Read more about criminal crypto services: Man gets 12.5 years before running Bitcoin Fog Crypto Mixer.
The BKA collaborated with the Frankfurt am Main Public Procurutor’s Office – Central Office for Combating Internet Crime (ZIT) to make the seizure on April 30 after the Extration operators had announced that the service would close on 1 May. They also took 8 TB of data that lived on the company’s servers.
“Again, we have secured a record-breaking sum of millions in accused cryptocurrencies and concluded a digital money laundering platform,” said BKA director, Carsten Meywirth.
“The size of the incident impressively shows that cyber crime is committed on an industrial scale. We will continue to increase the risk of loss for the underground economy with all means at our disposal. Our goal remains to keep the responsible person responsible.”
Although the German authorities are now the service offline, a blog post of Blockchain Inflooringbedrijf TRM Labs claimed last week that it was still able to provide some services from 2 May.
“Exch continues to offer access to application programming interface (API) to its business partners and TRM has observed continuous activity on the chains-included the money laundering of white behavior in accordance with the infrastructure with mixed pool,” said it.
The company explained that Exch was also chosen for action after it refused to collaborate with the attempts of Bybit to claw money back. It is also “one of the primary destinations for CSAM funds”, with at least $ 300,000 that is linked to it from these sources, TRM said.