Security Consultancy Peckshield has found that the remaining untouched cash lifted from DAO Maker (not to be confused with Maker DAO) in August last year is being mixed through the infamous crypto mixer Tornado Cash.
Crypto growth technologies provider DAO Maker suffered a $7 Million hack last year which brought about losses in several cryptocurrencies ranging from ETH to stablecoins. A year has passed, and the hackers are now moving some of the funds from a previously dormant address.
According to Peckshield, this wallet, tagged DAO Maker Exploiter, has transferred a sum of $500,000 Dai to Tornado Cash. Tornado Cash was recently banned from the U.S. due to its role in several money laundering cases.
#PeckShieldAlert #Phishing PeckShield has detected the address labeled as DAOMaker Exploiter has transferred 500k $DAI to TornadoCash pic.twitter.com/6VXfkoaCWO
— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) September 9, 2022
In 2021, immediately after the $7 million exploit, the attacker sent a sum of $6.2 million worth of Ether to this same crypto mixer. This might be the end of the road for tracing the hacker if this batch of transactions gets successfully obscured.
Tornado Cash is notorious for its capacity to wipe out any real traces of transactions, which has continued to endear scammers and hackers to the platform. The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction prohibits all US persons and entities from interacting with the protocol.
On banning the crypto mixer or crypto tumbler, OFAC also released a statement claiming that Tornado had been an instrument in laundering more than $7 billion worth of cryptocurrency since its inception three years ago.
However, this claim has been disproven by chainlink. It pointed out that the $7 billion amounts to the total transactions carried out on the protocol, negating the treasury department’s claim, which otherwise implies that every transaction carried out on the protocol is illegal.
Ethereum’s founder, Vitalik Buterin, also confirmed that this claim is unfounded, seeing as he had used the protocol to anonymously donate to Ukraine. The protocol’s founder has also said the crypto mixer is “unstoppable,” saying that the protocol isn’t controlled by any single entity just like Bitcoin.
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