The US Treasury Department today announced sanctions against cryptocurrency exchange Chatex for helping ransomware gangs evade sanctions and facilitate ransom transactions.
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The Treasury Department in September also imposed sanctions on the Russian-linked crypto exchange Suex for aiding at least eight ransomware groups, with over 40% of its known transactions linked to illegal actors.
Just like in the case of Suex, by imposing sanctions on Chatex, the US government aims to eliminate the main channel used by ransomware operations to collect ransom payments from their victims.
The Ministry of Finance appointed IZIBITS OU, Chatextech SIA and Hightrade Finance Ltd to assist Chatex with the creation of infrastructure and the activation of Chatex operations.
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By imposing sanctions on cryptocurrency exchanges that provide material support to ransomware gangs, the US hopes to drain their funding and disrupt their operations.
Suppression of ransomware payment channels
FinCEN's Financial Trends Analysis report was issued after governments around the world said they would crack down on cryptocurrency payment channels used by ransomware gangs.
A year ago, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) warned that ransomware negotiators could face civil penalties for facilitating ransom payments if their deals involve ransomware gangs.
The US government has also imposed sanctions against other entities and threat actors associated with ransomware operations in recent years.
The list of ransomware-related sanctions includes the developer of the Cryptolocker ransomware, two Iranians for providing material support to the SamSam ransomware, the Lazarus group, and two subgroups, Bluenoroff and Andariel.
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The US has also charged several members of the Evil Corp group with stealing over $100 million and added them to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions list. This group is associated with several ransomware families, including WastedLocker, Hades, Phoenix CryptoLocker, PayLoadBin, DoppelPaymer, Grief, and Macaw Locker.
Today, the Treasury Department also imposed sanctions on REvil associates Yaroslav Vasinskyi and Yevgeniy Polyanin for their involvement in developing ransomware payloads in 5,500 attacks.
The U.S. State Department also announced Thursday a $10,000,000 reward for the identification or location of key members of the DarkSide ransomware and $5,000,000 for information leading to the arrest of affiliates and other participants in attacks by the DarkSide group.
Last month, the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) detected approximately $5.2 billion worth of outbound Bitcoin transactions potentially linked to the top reported ransomware variants.
Information source: bleepingcomputer.com
