In early August, the US government made it illegal for US residents to use the crypto mixer Tornado Cash. The controversial decision met with a lot of resistance, but the mixer’s website is not much later taken offline. But the service’s wallets are still partially active, and hackers have now sent money to them.
Hackers Use Tornado Cash
That’s what blockchain analysis companies write PeckShield and CertiK on Twitter. The address of the DAO Maker hacker sent 500,000 DAI stablecoins to a Tornado Cash wallet. In September of 2021, hackers stole nearly $4 million worth of Maker tokens to loot on the DeFi platform DAO Maker, not to be confused with MakerDAO.
#PeckShieldAlert #Phishing PeckShield has detected the address labeled as DAOMaker Exploiter has transferred 500k $DAI to TornadoCash pic.twitter.com/6VXfkoaCWO
— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) Sep 9, 2022
We are seeing a movement of 500,000 $DAI to @TornadoCash from EOA 0x0B789.
The address is directly connected to the DAOmaker exploiter who stole funds from @TheDaoMaker.
Stay safe out there! pic.twitter.com/S22RFcA3N2
— CertiK Alert (@CertiKAlert) September 8, 2022
But hackers can’t always just cash out. Thanks to ever better regulation, it is becoming increasingly difficult to launder stolen tokens, for example by sending it to an exchange such as FTX – more and more exchanges are choosing to fully follow the rules and require identification. Crypto mixers often remained unaffected, although Tornado Cash and Blender.io, among others, have now been tackled. Criminals, like advocates of a certain degree of privacy, are therefore given fewer and fewer options.
But Tornado Cash’s website is now mostly working again. Sending coins to Tornado Cash wallets was still possible, if you had the right addresses at hand. Now, in addition to sending tokens, you can also return to these funds on the exchange-like platform.
Consequences After Tornado Cash Sanctions
Although it is possible to use the wallets, you can ask yourself whether it is wise. Circle was recently in the crypto news because it froze all USDC on Tornado Cash’s Ethereum (ETH) wallets. How this was possible is not clear, but it is believed to be indirect freezes where the coins would be confiscated as soon as they were sent to another centralized party.
This led MakerDAO to sell the USDC it held as collateral for Ethereum. It wanted to use this as collateral for the DAI stablecoin. This token would be the peg with the dollar thus deliberately losing, to prevent DAI from forcibly losing the collateral after an Ethereum crash. It’s a risky choice, and not everyone was in favor of it.