$63M laundered via Tornado Cash after $282M hack

$63 million from a $282 million crypto hack was laundered via Tornado Cash using cross-chain swaps and batch transfers to obscure the trail and hinder recovery.

A coordinated investigation has revealed that nearly $63 million from a $282 million crypto wallet hack was laundered through Tornado Cash, a crypto mixing service. The attacker exploited a social engineering scam to steal large amounts of Bitcoin and Litecoin, which were then bridged across multiple blockchains and converted into Ether and other cryptocurrencies. The stolen assets were fragmented into smaller tranches and routed through a series of wallets and exchanges, including KuCoin, WhiteBit, Huobi, and ChangeNOW, before being deposited into Tornado Cash. This laundering process involved batch transfers and cross-chain swaps, designed to obscure the transaction trail and complicate tracing efforts. Security analysts note that once assets enter Tornado Cash, the likelihood of recovery drops sharply due to the break in visible links between addresses. This incident highlights the increasing sophistication of laundering tactics in the crypto space and the challenges investigators face in tracking stolen funds across decentralized networks.