It seems that the Tornado Cash saga continues with celebrities receiving Ethereum from blacklisted addresses.
Tornado Cash, a virtual currency mixer operating on the Ethereum blockchain, has recently got into trouble with the U.S. Treasury as some of its addresses allegedly have been involved in money laundering.
Based on these sanctions, all U.S. residents, groups, or businesses are forbidden to interact with these addresses in any way, shape, or form. If the entity chooses not to cooperate and ignore these regulations, the governmental authority is set to issue fines of $50,000 to $10,000,000. Moreover, users can be sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison.
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Knowing about these consequences, on August 9th, an unknown user decided to prank U.S. celebrities by sending them 0,1 Ethereum (ETH) from the banned Tornado Cash address.
However, it seems that the prank may have been unsuccessful as the sanctions require “willful” engagement with banned Tornado Cash addresses to start a criminal investigation.
Therefore, it is most likely that the celebrities will not face any consequences for these transactions, as they have received Ethereum free of charge, with no prior knowledge or obligations.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to trace back the source of the transaction due to the design of Tornado Cash. So it remains unknown whether this prank was executed by one person, multiple people, or a whole group.
Following the U.S. Treasury sanctions, other two companies, Alchemy and Infura.io, decided to ban sanctioned Tornado Cash addresses from “their front-end applications”. Previously, stablecoin issuer Circle and online software development GitHub have also prohibited access to its platforms for these addresses.
The official Tornado Cash Twitter account shared a full list of companies that have taken these strict measures.
Back in April, Tornado Cash was attempting to disable illicit wallets from entering the platform, as it was suspected that multiple hackers were using the platform to launder money.
