Email From Alleged Cryptocurrency Money Launderer: Privacy Is Not A Crime

The US and European governments are increasingly focusing on Binance Holdings Ltd. and other top crypto players as the government scrutiny of Bitcoin has intensified and a company called ChipMixer is under the spotlight. There has been a lot of talk about the company being a way to launder money, and the man who allegedly started it appears to have disappeared.

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There were a couple of years ago when I had an email exchange with someone involved in ChipMixer, and the email I exchanged gives a good idea of the flimsy defense that was used by ChipMixer.

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Earlier this month, US and European authorities announced that ChipMixer, a web-based cryptocurrency "mixing" application which allowed users to commingle cryptocurrency assets and hide ownership traces, had been taken down. As reported by the US Justice Department, the service is offered by 49-year-old Vietnamese developer Minh Quc Nguyn, and has been used to launder billions of dollars worth of illicit proceeds from hackers, ransomware groups and other bad actors between 2017 and 2023.

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It should be noted that ChipMixer has also been implicated in an unusual crime that happened in 2017, in which a former Microsoft employee sold gift cards for Bitcoin in huge quantities and stole massive amounts of Xbox gift cards from Microsoft Corp. There was a pending federal case in which prosecutors inferred that the Bitcoins that were funneled through ChipMixer were a money laundering system that was designed to "obliterate the blockchain trail" of the transactions.

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I contacted the site for more information on the gift-card case while covering it, and a representative who refused to identify himself was adamant the service was not meant to spy on its users but simply to keep them anonymous. The writer wrote in 2021 that "Privacy is not a crime," as a way of protecting personal information.