Finnish authorities tracked transactions in the blockchain of the anonymous cryptocurrency Monero

What’s new? Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) managed to track transactions in the blockchain of the anonymous cryptocurrency Monero (XMR). This work was part of a criminal investigation into the hacking of the Vastaamo medical platform in September 2020. At the same time, the official Monero page claims that transactions on the network are untraceable. The project uses privacy-enhancing technologies, including hidden addresses and ring signatures.

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What else is known? The defendant in the case is Julius Aleksanteri Kivimäki. He hacked into the database of the Vastaamo psychotherapy center, gaining access to the records of 33 000 patients, and demanded a ransom of 40 bitcoins. After failing to receive the ransom, Kivimäki began blackmailing individual clients. He sent the funds he received to a KYC-free exchange and then exchanged them for XMR and withdrew them to a Monero wallet.

In January of this year, the prosecutor’s office received new evidence of his involvement. Thus, a chain of cryptocurrency transactions led to his bank account. According to media reports, the funds were later sent to Binance, exchanged again for bitcoins, and transferred to different wallets. Local authorities have not disclosed any further details about their analysis of the defendant’s online activity.

Monero uses Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT) technology, it mixes users’ transactions, hiding the actual source of funds. In turn, ring signatures conceal the identity of the sender, and the hidden address feature generates a one-time address for each transaction, making it difficult to link multiple transfers to the same recipient.

Last February, Dubai regulator VARA banned the issuance of anonymous cryptocurrencies. In June and September, Binance delisted all such assets for users in France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Belgium due to local legal requirements. OKX will also remove XMR along with other anonymous cryptocurrencies, ZEC and DASH, by March 5 this year.

The ZEC community proposed to completely abandon public transactions in this regard. Developer Josh Swihart said that the project should not “kowtow the whims of exchanges.” The Horizen team, on the contrary, removed the function of anonymizing transactions and is trying to bring information about the new status of the project to trading platforms to prevent the delisting of the native token.