The illicit crypto that was taken from the $35 million hack of Atomic Wallet has now been moved to a crypto mixer which is known to be favored by the most notorious cyber-hacking group in North Korea. On 5th June, Elliptic, the blockchain compliance analytics firm, went on to report that its Investigations Team had already traced the funds from the $35 million hack to a crypto mixer called Sinbad.io.
It also claims that the mixing service was previously in use to launder around $100 million in crypto assets which were stolen by Lazarus Group in North Korea. Interestingly, Elliptic didn’t specify just how much was sent to the mixer but also noted that the loot had been swapped for Bitcoin before it ended up being obfuscated through the mixer.
Atomic Wallet Hacker Has Been Dealing with North Korean Launderers
Elliptic also reported that the mixer was likely to be a rebranded version of Blender.io, which was another mixer used pretty regularly to launder the funds of the Lazarus Group and was also the first mixer that was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department. Several user accounts for the Atomic Wallet were compromised on 3rd June, which resulted in losses racking up to $35 million. However, the firm ended up downplaying the incident, claiming that the attack had impacted under 1% of the total monthly active users.
Roland Sade, the chief marketing officer, of Atomic Wallet, informed Cointelegraph that the team had been doing everything to get the funds back. He further added that in order to create a solid plan, the investigation has to be complete. He suggested that the victims of the hack could track the illicit transfers and then report them to the most popular crypto exchanges, which would prevent the scammers from intermixing the funds.
