German investigators have switched off the world's largest money laundering service in the Darknet. They confiscated the German-based servers of the platform "ChipMixer" and Bitcoins worth around 44 million euros, as the General Prosecutor's Office in Frankfurt am Main and the Federal Criminal Police Office announced on Wednesday. The operators of the service are said to have engaged in commercial money laundering and a criminal trading platform on the Internet.

"ChipMixer" had been a service existing since 2017, which accepted the digital currency Bitcoin from criminal origin in order to pay it out again from obfuscation processes, the so-called "mixing". The deposited crypto values were therefore divided into uniform small amounts, which were called "chips". These were then mixed up to hide the origin of the money. "ChipMixer" had promised users complete anonymity.

It is estimated that Bitcoins worth 2.8 billion euros have been laundered via the platform. This made it the world's highest-grossing Krpytomixer in the Darknet. Much of it originated from darknet marketplaces, fraudulently obtained crypto assets and other criminal acts. The main accused was wanted by US authorities.