Suspicious transactions are still being made in the Tornado Cash mixer

Despite U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctions on the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer, suspicious transfers of crypto assets are still being made in it.

In early August, the Tornado Cash service was blocked by the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). However, suspicious transactions are still being made through Tornado Cash. Analysts at CertiK, a cybersecurity company, reported a suspicious transfer of funds to Tornado Cash in the amount of $2.4 million. CertiK experts suggested that these funds may be related to the BXH decentralized exchange hack, during which hackers stole digital assets worth $139 million.

A privileged function was performed from a certain address to withdraw funds from a staking contract on Binance Smart Chain and Avalanche. The crypto assets were then transferred via a bridge to Ethereum, where ERC-20 tokens were exchanged for ETH. Thus, 1,865 ETH was transferred to the Tornado Cash service for a total amount of more than $2.4 million.

This is not the only such case. Recently, 500,000 DAI was entered into the mixer, which may be related to the hacking of the crowdfunding platform DAO Maker, which suffered from an attack last August. Due to a bug in the DAO Maker smart contract, attackers were able to steal more than $7 million in stablecoins. The mixer was also used by another hacker who stole crypto assets from Ethereum users who generated human-readable names using the Profanity service. He transferred 732 ETH to Tornado Cash.

About two weeks ago, OFAC clarified that the Tornado Cash block does not prevent US citizens from copying and publishing the service’s source code. However, the department has not removed the direct ban on the use of the mixer.