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Chinese 'Spies' Used Wasabi Wallet to Try to Conceal Bitcoin Bribes, Elliptic Says
Analysis by the crypto analytics firm showed that all the bitcoin bribes originated from the coin mixing wallet.
Guochun He and Zheng Wang, the two Chinese intelligence officers charged with obstructing justice for allegedly bribing a U.S. double agent with $61,000 in bitcoin, used coin mixing wallet Wasabi Wallet to try to cover their tracks, analytics firm Elliptic found.
“Elliptic’s analysis shows that all of the bitcoin bribe payments made by the Chinese intelligence agents originated from Wasabi Wallet,” Elliptic said.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Wasabi makes use of controversial technology known as CoinJoin, which mixes bitcoin from multiple transactions to try to obscure its ownership.
Read more: Bitcoin Mixers: How Do They Work and Why Are They Used?
Elliptic has shown in the past that Wasabi was used to try to launder bitcoin (BTC) from high-profile hacks of Twitter, as well as of crypto exchanges Bitfinex and KuCoin.
The two Chinese officers are charged with seeking to gain confidential information in a federal investigation into the practices of what is believed to be Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies.
They repeatedly referred to the use of bitcoin as a “safe” method of making the bribery payments, according to the indictment.
Nelson Wang
Nelson edits features and opinion stories and was previously CoinDesk’s U.S. News Editor for the East Coast. He has also been an editor at Unchained and DL News, and prior to working at CoinDesk, he was the technology stocks editor and consumer stocks editor at TheStreet. He has also held editing positions at Yahoo.com and Condé Nast Portfolio’s website, and was the content director for aMedia, an Asian American media company. Nelson grew up on Long Island, New York and went to Harvard College, earning a degree in Social Studies. He holds BTC, ETH and SOL above CoinDesk’s disclosure threshold of $1,000.
