US authorities have arrested and indicted 36-year-old Larry Harmon from Ohio. He is accused of organizing the work of the Helix cryptocurrency mixing service, which operated on the darknet and helped criminals to hide the origin of transactions with bitcoins. Such services help "obscure the trail" by turning a simple transfer of funds from one account to another into a complex scheme: instead of one transaction, the service breaks down the required payment into hundreds or thousands of small transfers that are sent to different accounts and go through many wallets before reaching the goal ...
According to law enforcement officials, Helix was only a side project for Harmon, linked to his main service, Grams, a search engine that indexed many drug-related marketplaces on the darknet. Grams allowed users to search for drugs and find the best deals. Helix, in turn, was just an add-on and offered potential buyers a way to hide their identity when purchasing.
The Justice Department reports that Harmon ran Helix from 2014 to 2017, and through his service 354,468 bitcoins were laundered, whose value at the time of transactions was about $ 300 million, and today it is already approaching $ 3.5 billion.
As the service developed, Harmon collaborated with other services on the darknet. In particular, according to the indictment, he worked with the largest trading platform of the time, AlphaBay, and AlphaBay recommended Helix to its users as a safe and reliable mixing service for bitcoins.
Harmon charged a 2.5% commission for all Helix transactions. As a result, law enforcement agencies are now seeking not only to put Harmon in jail, but also to confiscate from him three properties that the suspect bought with money of illegal origin.
The case filed against Larry Harmon is the first time that the US authorities have pursued a mixer service.
Let me remind you that in 2017, one of the largest and most popular mixing services in the world at that time, BitMixer, unexpectedly announced its termination. This happened shortly after the closure of the AlphaBay and Hansa marketplaces by law enforcement agencies, as well as after the arrest of Alexander Vinnik and going offline of BTC-e. In their farewell message, BitMixer administrators wrote that such services are always popular among cybercriminals and noted that "very soon such activity will be regarded as illegal in most countries."
