The resident from South Florida was identified as the perpetrator in selling hacked accounts and distributing "illicit items" for cryptocurrencies.
As crypto regulations start to set in throughout the United States, government agencies are now heavily involved in overseeing the digital asset market.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) announced yesterday that the Southern District of Florida has managed to secure a "civil forfeiture complaint", seizing about $34M in crypto. The hacker was supposedly involved in more than 100K sales of various illegal items and services like accounts by accessing darknet marketplaces through the TOR network.
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According to the specifics of the case, the Florida resident used cryptocurrency mixers to make the illegally obtained funds extremely hard to trace, which is a form of laundering money.
In fact, these mixers are widely accessible without accessing the darknet, with multiple hackers and "rug pullers" using platforms such as Tornado cash to break the on-chain link between the deposit and withdrawal.
The joint US law enforcement initiative called Operation TORnado (as in the TOR network) was formed to prevent such cases from happening, with digital assets such as Bitcoin being the network’s most prominent currency for over a decade.
At the end of March, one New York resident was charged for laundering approximately $2.7M worth of crypto for using the funds to distribute illegal substances.
