New York – hack and fraud victims who reached out to Tornado Cash, requesting assistance that picked up their stolen funds, received a little in the way of help from the privacy developers, three governmenties told the jury during the day two in the novel Storm’s criminal laundering of laundering.
A victim, a Taiwan-born Georgia woman who said she lost nearly $ 250,000 to a wrong number pig swinging fraud-with part of the proceeds laundered through Tornado Cash-spa that her request for help was unanswered. Another witness, a lawyer for Crypto Exchange Bitmart, who was hacked for nearly $ 200 million in 2021, said Storm told his team that there was nothing he or his colleagues could do to pick up the funds given the decentralized nature of the protocol.
A third witness, Andy Ho-Cto and co-founder at Sky Mavis, Blockchain game company behind Axie Infinity and the Ronin network detailed how hackers stole over $ 625 million in the exploitation of Ronin Bridge in 2022, which actually fully looted the protocol’s chests. Although Ho himself did not mention it during his testimony, the group behind the exploitation was later revealed to be the Lazarus group, North Korea’s state-sponsored hacking organization, which used Tornado cash to launder some of the stolen funds.
During their examination of the three witnesses, prosecutors tried to paint a portrait of storm as one who refused to lift a finger to help hack victims or to make changes to Tornado Cash Protocol to deter the future use of the protocol of criminals.
Storm’s attorneys, when they had the chance to cross the investigation of the “victim” witnesses, threw their client’s inaction in another light: he was, they hinted, unable to help pick up funds because Tornado Cash was decentralized. Storm told Bitmart’s Lawyer-New York-based Joseph Evans, a partner at the law firm McDermott, Will and Emery-So himself in an email on December 15, 2021, according to an exhibition introduced by the government.
Evans also admitted to the cross-examination that Tornado Cash was not the only place that Bitmart’s hacked funds went after the exploitation: His company also reached 1 inch, a decentralized exchange unit who asked them to come back with an order, as well as the cloudflare-a large site infrastructure provider and binance. Evans said he did not receive any response from the latter two companies.
Brian Klein, a partner at Waymaker LLP and a lawyer for novel Storm, Evans asked if it was true that the only person who had ever responded directly to Evans’ queries in the wake of Bitmart’s hack was Roman Storm.
“That’s correct,” Evans said.
Storm’s lawyers asked Ho, CTO for Sky Mavis, a similar line of questions when he was on the booth, although Ho – who said he had been sued by the government and asked to travel to New York from his hometown Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam to testify – were less coming.
Keri Axel, another Waymaker partner and member of Storm’s Defense Team, asked Ho if he remembered the findings presented to Sky Mavis in Crowdstrike after exploitation, including the stolen funds having filtered through a series of protocols and exchanges besides Tornado Cash, including FTX, Huobi and Crypto.com.
“I can’t remember it,” Ho told each.
Axel asked how much, if any of the stolen money was able to eventually be recovered. Ho said $ 6 million was returned by Norwegian police.
“Did you understand that $ 6 million had gone through Tornado Cash?” Asked Axel Ho.
“I don’t have that knowledge,” Ho said.
Read more: Legitimate Privacy Tool or Dirty Money Laundromat? Attorneys debate the role of Tornado Cash on Day 1 in Roman Storm Attempt
