Allegedly Facilitating Money Laundering, Tornado Cash Developer Arrested

JAKARTA – One of the developers of Tornado Cash was arrested by the Dutch authorities, FIOD (Fiscale inlichtingen opsporingsdienst). FIOD is the Dutch government agency tasked with investigating financial crimes. Then, what is Tornado Cash?

According to crypto audit agency CertiK, Tornado Cash is a service that combines various potentially identifiable cryptocurrency streams. Tornado Cash increases the anonymity of transactions, as it makes cryptocurrencies more difficult to track.

On August 10, FIOD announced the arrest of one of the 29-year-old Tornado Cash developers. The reason for the arrest, the person is involved in the crime of concealing the flow of illicit money and facilitating money laundering. However, the Dutch financial investigation agency did not reveal the identity of the person in more detail on its official website, fiod.nl.

While the United States has already banned Tornado Cash services built on the Ethereum network. Because the platform is considered to have the potential to be a place for money laundering on a large scale. They also think that Tornado Cash helps owners of illegal activity funds become more anonymous.

“Tornado Cash is a mixing service for cryptocurrencies. Online services make it possible to hide the origin or destination of cryptocurrencies. The origin (criminals) of cryptocurrencies are often not or barely checked by those mixing services. Mixing service users mostly do this to increase their anonymity," reads a statement from FIOD.

While FIOD itself has been investigating Tornado Cash since June 2022 because it saw the possibility that the platform was used by the criminal organization Lazarus Group, a hacker group from North Korea. Lazarus himself is suspected of being responsible for the large-scale cryptocurrency theft that has occurred in recent years.

The arrests drew various comments from the crypto community. One of them is from Bitcoin Magazine writer, Stephan Livera.

“Imagine if a road builder was arrested “because criminals used it”? Or a home curtain installer? Wanting privacy should not be considered a crime," Livera said, August 12, 2022.