Security News > 2021 > August > New Anti Anti-Money Laundering Services for Crooks

"Worried about dirty funds in your BTC address? Come check out Antinalysis, the new address risk analyzer," reads the service's announcement, pointing to a link only accessible via ToR. "This service is dedicated to individuals that have the need to possess complete privacy on the blockchain, offering a perspective from the opponent's point of view in order for the user to comprehend the possibility of his/her funds getting flagged down under autocratic illegal charges."

"Some people might ask, why go into all that? Just cash out in XMR and be done with it. The problem is, cashing out in Monero raises eyebrows on exchanges and mail by cash method is sometimes risky as well. If you use BTC->XMR->BTC method, you'll still get flagged down by our services labelled as high risk exchange. Our service provides you with a view from LE/exchange's perspective of things that provides you with basic knowledge of how"clean" your address is.

Tom Robinson, co-founder of blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic, said Antinalysis is designed to help crypto money launderers test whether their funds will be identified as proceeds of crime by regulated financial exchanges.

With countless criminals now making millions from ransomware, there is certainly a vast, untapped market for services that help those folks improve their operational security.

Nick Bax is an independent expert in tracing cryptocurrency transactions, and he said it appears Antinalysis may be little more than a clone of AMLBot, an anti- anti-money laundering intelligence service that first came online in 2019.

Update, 1:52 p.m. ET: Elliptic updated its blog post to confirm the connection between Antinanlysis and AMLBot, noting that AMLBot itself is a reseller of yet another service: "As first suggested in an article by Brian Krebs, we can now confirm that the results provided by Antinalysis are identical to those provided by AMLBot. It is therefore likely that Antinalysis makes use of the AMLBot API. AMLBot is itself a reseller for Crystal Blockchain, an analytics provider."

News URL

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/08/new-anti-anti-money-laundering-services-for-crooks/