Poloniex Hacker Transfers Over $3.3 Million Worth of ETH to Sanctioned Tornado Cash

The hacker behind the attack on cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex in November 2023, recently transferred more than 1,100 Ethereum (ETH) to sanctioned cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash.

The hacker sent ether in batches while still holding over $180 million in assets across different blockchains.

Poloniex Hacker's Laundry of 1,120 ETH

according to Data From Arkham Intelligence, a Poloniex hacker transferred 100 ETH in 11 payments to Tornado Cash, bringing the total to 1,100 ETH (worth about $3.37 million), and another two 10 ETH (worth about $61,400) on May 7, all within four hours. .

Aside from Ether, a former Poloniex hacker 501.62 Bitcoins were transferred About $32 million on April 30 to an unknown Bitcoin address (bc1qt…xfekh).

The hacker's wallet currently holds assets worth $181.3 million, which includes Ethereum, TRX, Bitcoin (BTC), BTCT, and Floki, with Ethereum being their largest holding of 25,563 ETH worth $78.6 million.

In November 2023, Poloniex lost $125 million in cryptocurrency assets to a hacker, with more than 175 different tokens stolen from the exchange's hot wallet.

After the attack, Poloniex owner Justin Sun promised full repayment of the affected funds and also offered a 5% reward to the hacker if he returned 95% of the stolen funds within seven days.

Blockchain security firm PeckShield revealed in March that the hackers behind the HECO Bridge exploit, which also occurred in November 2023, transferred more than 40,391 Ethereum ($145.7 million) into Tornado Cash.

Tornado Cash is still being used by rogue actors

The latest development indicates that cybercriminals are still using Tornado Cash, an anonymization tool that allows users to obfuscate transaction paths, despite being sanctioned by the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in August 2022.

According to the US Treasury Department, cryptocurrency mixers have been used by cybercriminals such as North Korea's Lazarus Group to launder stolen funds.

Following OFAC sanctions, the developers behind Tornado Cash are facing allegations of money laundering and sanctions violations.

Dutch prosecutors accused Alexei Burtsev, one of the developers arrested in the Netherlands in August 2022, of laundering $1.2 billion worth of cryptocurrencies through a mixer.

Roman Storm has pleaded not guilty in the US to laundering more than $1 billion in stolen cryptocurrency funds among other allegations, while a third developer, Roman Semenov, who was added to OFAC's sanctions list, remains at large.