The United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced on Friday that it was sanctioning cryptocurrency mixer Blender.io for its role in laundering proceeds from Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge hack. State-funded North Korean hackers, Lazarus Group, have been identified as the perpetrators of the attack.
The Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Brian E. Nelson said in a statement:
“Today, for the first time, Treasury sanctions a virtual currency mixer. […] We are cracking down on illicit financial activity in the DPRK and will not allow state-sponsored theft and its money laundering facilitators to go unanswered.”
Under the sanctions, all Blender.io assets in the United States or in the possession of US persons are blocked and must be reported to OFAC.
According to OFAC, Blender.io processed $20.5 million of the approximately $620 million stolen from the Vietnam-based play-to-earn game, in the form of approximately 173,600 Ether (ETH) and 25.5 million USD Coin (USDC). OFAC also discovered during its investigation that Blender.io had facilitated money laundering for Russia-linked ransomware groups such as Trickbot, Conti, Ryuk, Sodinokibi, and Gandcrab. The Blender.io website was down at the time of writing.
The Treasury agency has also added the addresses of four wallets used by the Lazarus Group to launder some of the stolen funds to its List of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons.
There has been a security breach on the Ronin Network.https://t.co/ktAp9w5qpP
— Ronin (@Ronin_Network) March 29, 2022
The Ronin Bridge hack took place on March 23, but was not discovered until the following week. The bridge was accessed through game developer Sky Mavis. This organization had been whitelisted indefinitely after helping process a surge in transactions. Sky Mavis raised $150 million to reimburse users who lost money in the exploit, and Binance was able to recover $5.8 million of money from 86 accounts. Lazarus Group was identified as the hackers by OFAC in mid-April.
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