New York – Hack victims and scammers who communicated with Tornado Cash requesting assistance to recover their stolen funds received little help from the developers of the privacy tool, three witnesses of the government said to the jury during the two day of the judgment of criminal money of Roman Storm.
A victim, a woman from Georgia, born in Taiwan, who said she lost almost $ 250,000 for a carnage scam of erroneous numbers, with a part of the washed earnings through Tornado’s cash, said her request for help was unanswered. Another witness, a Crypto Exchange Bitmart lawyer, who was pirate for almost $ 200 million in 2021, said Storm told his team that there was nothing that he or his fellow developers could do to recover the funds given the decentralized nature of the protocol.
A third witness, Andy Ho, CTO and co -founder of Sky Mavis, the Blockchain Game Company behind Axie Infinity and the Ronin network, explained how computer pirates stole more than $ 625 million in an exploit of the Ronin bridge in 2022, in effect, completely looting the protocol chests. Although HO himself did not mention it during his testimony, it was revealed that the group behind the exploit was the Lazarus group, the piracy organization sponsored by North Korea, which used Tornado’s cash to wash a part of the stolen funds.
During their examination of the three witnesses, prosecutors tried to paint a storm portrait like someone who refused to lift a finger to help hack the victims, or make changes in the tornado cash protocol to dissuade the future use of the protocol by criminals.
Storm’s lawyers, when they had the opportunity to interrogate the witnesses of the “victim”, threw the lack of action of their client in another light: he was insinuated, unable to help recover funds, because Tornado’s cash was decentralized. Storm told Bitmart: Joseph Evans, based in New York, partner of the McDermott, Will and Emery law firm, so he himself in an email on December 15, 2021, according to an exhibition presented by the Government.
Evans also admitted in the interrogation that Tornado Cash was not the only place where Bitmart’s pirate funds went after the exploit: his company also contacted 1 inch, a decentralized exchange aggregator, which told them to return with a court order, also as Cloudflare, an important infrastructure provider of the website, and Binance. Evans said he did not receive a response from the last two companies.
Brian Klein, a partner of Waymaker LLP and lawyer at Roman Storm, asked Evans if it was true that the only person who had responded directly to Evans’s investigations following Bitmart’s hack was the Roman storm.
“That’s right,” Evans said.
Storm’s lawyers asked Ho, Sky Mavis’s CTO, a similar line of questions when he was on the podium, although Ho, who said he had been summoned by the government and asked to travel to New York from his hometown of the city of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, to testify, was less close.
Keri Axel, another Waymaker partner and a member of the Storm defense team, asked HO if he remembered the findings presented to Sky Mavis by Crowdstrike after the exploit, including that the stolen funds had leaked through several protocols and exchanges in addition to cash, including FTX, Huobi and Crypto.com.
“I don’t remember,” Ho told each one.
Axel asked how much, if anyone, the stolen money could recover. Ho said Norwegian police returned $ 6 million.
“Did he understand that $ 6 million had passed through Tornado’s cash?” Axel asked Ho.
“I don’t have that knowledge,” said Ho.
Read more: legitimate privacy tool or dirty money laundry? The role of debate of the tornado cash lawyers on day 1 of the Roman storm trial
