NEW YORK – Lawyers for tornado cash developer Roman Storm told a judge on Monday that he is considering filing a false hearing claim following a new revelation that the government may have inaccurately tracked the proceeds of pig slaughter fraud in a privacy tool.
The victim of the fraud was a Taiwan-born Georgia woman named Hanfen Lin, who testified on the first day of Storm’s trial that she lost about $250,000 in the wrong number of whatsapp scams. After the scam, Lin and her husband hired a so-called “crypto recovery service” called recall. When Ling emailed Tornado Cash’s general email address, she didn’t receive a response. The prosecution sought to be portrayed as evidence of Storm’s indifference in the light letters of hack and fraud victims.
However, over the weekend, Taylor Monahan (aka @tayvano_x), founder of Blockchain Sluth and MyCrypto, posted a thread on X. Monaghan explained that he found Lin’s crypto transactions in an unrelated 2023 incident involving NTU Capital, the fraud company that Lin transferred its crypto. When investigating Ling’s funding flow, Monahan said none of the Ling’s money was handed over to Tornado Cash, but explained that inexperienced tracers such as Payback (called “rather than f****** idiots”) could have been off track while using Instaswappers. In addition to her X-thread, Monahan created a trace report containing accurate details of Ling’s transactions.
Several other blockchain detectives, including well-known pseudonym investigator ZachxBT, confirmed Monaghan’s analysis. Payback did not respond to Coindesk’s request for comment by time-by-time reporting.
“How we ruined that bad trace as a company that failed to properly track an instant exchange deposit 1 hop from an IDK theft address, then followed TXNS on the wrong path to a tornado…” Zachxbt wrote to X on Monday. “These looting companies appear as Google’s first search results when victims are seeking help. ”
David Patton, Storm’s lawyer and partner at Hecker Fink LLP, told district judge Katherine Polk Failla that the defense team tried to track Ling’s funds over the weekend and could not find a relationship between her money and tornado cash. Patton hoped the court had confirmed that Lynn’s funds were flowing through tornado cash prior to trial, and that the government’s relevant expert witnesses – Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Joel DeCapua, a special agent overseeing the FBI’s cyber unit, had testified that it had something to do with Demad Cash links. He was asked by the prosecutor to investigate the link between Lynn’s funds and tornado cash, and was unable to testify.
Leading prosecutor Nathan “Thane” Lane opposes the allegations and tells the judge that another government witness, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent, can testify about the relationship between Lynn’s funds and tornado cash, saying it is “very easy” and “very easy” and “some short hops” between “some short hops” and privacy software.
Fila doesn’t know in the court whether Lynn’s transactions can actually return to tornado cash, as he has no expertise in blockchain tracing.
“I simply don’t know,” she said.
FBI in the stand
Most of the witness testimony on Monday came from FBI agent Joel DeCapua, who gave the ju apprentices a brief summary of 16 major crypto hacks, including the 2020 Kucoin Hack, the 2021 Kucoin Hack, and the 2022 Ronin Network.
After a mutual review, Patton asked Decapua if he knew that NTU Capital, which cost Ling (the front of the fraud that cost Ling), had run a crypto fraud of over $100 million. Decapua replied that he wasn’t. Patton asked Decapure if he had tracked down other well-known crypto hacks, including the 2022 $320 million hack wormhole.
“I’ve never even heard of that,” Decapua said.
Decapua also publicly declared that he had no knowledge of face-to-face crimes, including codes such as the seduction of temptations and so-called “wrench attacks.”
“Hypothetically, that could happen,” Decapua said when asked if such a risk was possible.
When asked if it was true that both ordinary people and criminals used virtual private networks (VPNS), Decapua said it was true that many ordinary people used VPNs on their working computers, but said it was “very strange” for ordinary people to use non-work VPNs.
“I don’t think that normal people use VPNs for everyday communication,” Decapua said.
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