The law enforcement authorities are able to trace back the transactions to the users, but if the mixers are used, then that makes their task a lot more complicated. And that is one of the reasons why they are trying to close down the Bitcoin mixers (or comically, trying to make KYC mandatory for all the cryptocurrency mixers, including Chip Mixer).
Do you have a source that says authorities are trying to close down mixers?
Anyway, the source itself doesn't say that their Bitcoin transactions led to their arrests, so I feel like this article is just making assumptions here. All that has been mentioned is that the suspects are known to use Bitcoin for laundering money, among many other methods. Certain addresses have been
blacklisted too, though I have no idea what implications that brings.
Providing in behalf of byrant.coleman
https://cointelegraph.com/news/cryptocurrency-mixers-and-why-governments-may-want-to-shut-them-downThey are cracking up mixers due to this reason where it do makes more hard for them to traced up tainted coins with these mixing services.
We already seen some being sampled out and some do voluntarily closes down just like Bitblender due for this reason.
As usual into these kind of incidents when in come to illegal aspect and suspect being caught.Bitcoin is always been dragged down and actually not a surprising thing.
Many thanks for posting this. Apart from Bitblender, many other Bitcoin mixers are also facing the heat from the authorities. Currently the biggest Bitcoin mixer in active service (Chipmixer) is having issues with the authorities after it was established that the Binance hackers used their services to wash at least
BTC5,000 of the stolen Bitcoins.
I guess the first large-scale Bitcoin mixer to close down was Bitmixer.io. At that time, they were saying that the closure is due to issue within the Bitcoin algorithm, which makes maintaining anonymity difficult. And one example of a mixer closed down by the authorities is that of Bestmixer.io. They were forcibly closed down by the
Fiscale Inlichtingenen Opsporings Dienst (FIOD) of the Netherlands.