- An individual spent huge amounts of ETH on Magic the Gathering cards.
- This has raised suspicions in the crypto sector about the origin of the funds.
Scams and attacks in the crypto sector have become common in recent years. Hackers are constantly trying to figure out how to get away with stolen money without being discovered.
Where’s the magic?
Throughout the year, an individual has withdrawn over 11,200 ETH from Tornado Cash. This person spent it on Magic: The Gathering (MTG) trading cards.
For context, Magic: The Gathering is a popular collectible card game.
Someone took out 110 batches of 100 Ethereum (ETH) and divided them into 11 addresses. They then packaged the ETH, moved the packaged ETH to new addresses, unpacked it and sent USDC to an MTG broker.
They did this to deceive stock exchange controls (KYT) and make it less clear where the money was going. This process involves a series of steps to confuse the tracking and hide the money flow.
To identify the broker, we had to check Instagram usernames and contact MTG sellers in the chain.
Notably, the buyer exhibited strange behavior: he overpaid for MTG items, showed limited knowledge of cryptocurrencies, and personally transacted with sellers via crypto transactions. Funds also went to Kraken, Bitpay and Coinbase.
1/ All year long I’ve been keeping an eye on someone who has withdrawn over 11,200 ETH ($25 million) from Tornado Cash and spent most of it on Magic The Gathering (MTG) trading cards.
Here is my analysis of where the money went and what the potential source of money could be.
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) December 7, 2023
Possible theories
One hypothesis suggests that these funds come from the $50 million Uranium Finance hack in April 2021.
Anubis and Cashio were ruled out as potential sources, leaving Uranium a viable candidate based on the deposits at Tornado and the timeline correlation with the hacker’s activities.
The suspicious nature of the expenses, the overpayments, and the individual’s embezzlement methods raise questions about the source and purpose of the money.
The suspicious behavior could raise suspicions about the crypto world just as it is about to gain further mainstream popularity thanks to ETFs.
This type of behavior can not only impact industry sentiment, but will also impact regulatory oversight of the industry.
Realistic or not, here it is The market cap of ETH in BTC terms
ETH sees green
Despite ETH being the main transfer method for the potential attacker, the price of ETH remained unaffected. At the time of writing, ETH was trading at $2,373.91 and grew 5.05% in the past 24 hours.
Source: Santiment