A security company, Elliptic Connect, has recently traced the funds from the latest $35 million Atomic Wallet scam to a service known for coin mixing.
Moreover, Called Sinbad, the coin mixer is also favored by Lazarus, the infamous North Korean hacker.
According to Elliptic reports, the “stolen funds were exchanged for BTC (Bitcoin)” before they were laundered via Sinbad.
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Coin mixers allow for anonymity in crypto activities by recklessly mixing cryptocurrency transfers to obscure the destination and origin of the funds.
The Department of Justice last year backlisted Tornado Cash, another well-known Ethereum mixing service.
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This move essentially banned American citizens from making use of the service.
The agency stated that it sanctioned the project because of its connection to aiding criminals to launder money.
As per reports from the company, the users of Atomic Wallet were scammed of $35 million in a hack last weekend and this hack affected up to 1% of its 5 million users.
The scammers made away with users’ funds in various tokens such as; Tether’s USDT, Cardano (ADA), Ripple (XRP), and DOGE (Dogecoin).
In the meantime, the crypto wallet service provider is yet to find out the causative agent of the hack.
Moreover, the service has failed to guarantee the safety of the other unaffected users.
Atomic Wallet Scammer’s Connection to Lazarus
Elliptic’s analysts discovered that the Sinbad mixer was an ordinary copy of a different sanctioned mixer, Blender and Lazarus.
Also, they laundered more than $100 million in stolen funds through Sinbad last February this year.
Earlier this year, Elliptic Connect was among the first companies that built a relationship with Sinbad and Lazarus groups.
Lazarus is a North Korean state-sponsored hacking group.
Reportedly, it has stolen $1.2 billion from the cryptocurrency sector from 2017 until the last year-end.
Even, the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) mentioned that Lazarus is the major suspect in the Harmony Protocol hack of $100 million last June.
According to the FBI announcement, the agency and its investigative partners will carry on to disrupt and identify North Korea’s theft and laundering of virtual currency.
They used it previously to finance North Korea’s ballistic missile and Weapons of Mass Destruction programs.
