Dutch Police Arrested Tornado Cash Developer

At the end of last week, the Dutch authorities reported that one of the alleged developers of Tornado Cash had been arrested in Amsterdam. This came just a few days after the US authorities imposed sanctions on this cryptocurrency mixer.

Let me remind you that on August 8, 2022, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) stated that in total, more than $ 7 billion was laundered through Tornado Cash that was created in 2019, and its operators were unable or unwilling to introduce “effective controls designed to prevent money laundering on a regular basis.”

As a result, sanctions were imposed against the mixer service: all property and financial interests of Tornado Cash (located in the USA or owned or controlled by persons from the USA) turned out to be blocked and they must be reported to OFAC. Also, US citizens and others in the United States are no longer able to do business with Tornado Cash without special permission from OFAC. In addition, any organizations that are directly or indirectly owned by such people by 50 percent or more will also be “banned”.

In fact, an autonomous smart contract was included in the sanctions list (which now raises a lot of questions from lawyers), and the website, forum, Discord server, and even the Tornado Cash GitHub repository stopped working.

A 29-year-old man was arrested in Amsterdam on August 12, according to the Dutch Financial Information and Investigation Service (FIOD), who is suspected of having links with Tornado Cash and “involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering,” according to the Dutch Financial Information and Investigation Service (FIOD).

Also, FIOD representatives agreed with their overseas counterparts and stated that “Tornado Cash was used to hide large-scale criminal cash flows, including those associated with the theft of cryptocurrencies.” The agency does not rule out that this arrest may be followed by others.