Used for money laundering of Bybit loot: Authorities shut down crypto portal
For over a decade, eXch allowed anonymous crypto swaps. Upon closure, the BKA intervened.
The reference to the raid
(Image: BKA)
Last week, the Federal Criminal Police Office, in cooperation with the public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt am Main, paralyzed the cryptocurrency platform eXch, seized its server infrastructure and confiscated cryptocurrency worth 34 million euros. The BKA has now announced this and explained that the service, which has been in existence since 2014, "in particular accepted Bitcoin of criminal origin". Submitted cryptocurrency could then be exchanged for other cryptocurrencies. Thanks to the guaranteed anonymity for users, financial flows could be concealed during this "swapping", according to the statement.
Raid shortly before announced closure
According to the public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt am Main, crypto assets with an estimated total value of 1.9 billion US dollars have been transferred via the service since it was launched. This is said to have included some of the loot from the record theft at Bybit. The operators of eXch are suspected of commercial money laundering and operating a criminal trading platform on the internet. They had announced their intention to shut down the platform on May 1. The law enforcement authorities anticipated this and were able to secure "numerous pieces of evidence and traces" despite the short preparation time.
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In total, more than 8 terabytes of data are stored on the seized hardware, and cryptocurrency was seized alongside Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin and Dash. This was the third largest seizure of crypto assets in the history of the BKA. In the course of the operation, a notice about the seizure was published on the crypto platform's homepage, and Dutch authorities were also involved. Those responsible assume that the information that can now be viewed will help to solve numerous other crimes.
"Crypto-swapping is an essential part of the underground economy, used to conceal incriminated funds from illegal activities such as hacking or trading in stolen payment card data and thus make them available to the perpetrators," explains the Senior Public Prosecutor of the Central Office for Combating Cybercrime at the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor General's Office. It is therefore all the more important to take action against these opportunities for fast and anonymous money laundering. The aim is also to bring those responsible to justice, according to the BKA.
(mho)
