Dutch Authorities Shut Down Bestmixer

The Dutch Financial Intelligence and Investigation Service (FIOD) has shut down cryptomixing site Bestmixer.io.According to local media, Dutch authorities moved to shut down the site on May 22, 2019, as part of a joint operation with police agencies from several European nations, including France, Latvia and Luxembourg. Following concerns originally raised by the online security company McAfee in 2018, the FIOD has claimed that the service was used for money laundering.As Dutch media reported, no arrests have yet been made in the Bestmixer case, as Europol officials attempt to determine the extent to which criminal money laundering was used on the site.McAfee also released its own report on the FIOD’s action against Bestmixer, describing the site’s possible connections to cybercrime and usage as an easy way to launder money.The “bitcoin laundering” technique described by McAfee is fundamentally the same as the CoinJoin protocol, which allows multiple users to pool transactions into a single group, scrambling funds and obscuring links between sending and receiving addresses. CoinJoin has, over the last year, come to occupy a substantial percentage of all crypto transactions in the space. As such, it may be cause for concern that this legal action against Bestmixer could come to affect other, similar crypto services.“Today’s Bestmixer seizure shows an increase in law enforcement activities on pure crypto-to-crypto services,” D...