An Ohio man, who operated the Grams dark-web search engine and the Helix cryptocurrency money-laundering service associated with it, has been sentenced to three years in prison. Larry Dean Harmon, 41, set up Grams in April 2014. Three months later he also set up on the dark web Helix, a so-called mixer or tumbler service that pools and swaps people's Bitcoins to obfuscate the original sources, according to court documents.
You put your BTC into Helix and you get the equivalent amount of other people's out. You can only imagine why someone would want to do that. Hint: You don't want your funds associated with wallets used by cybercrime marketplaces.
Over three years of operation, Harmon laundered 354,468 bitcoins (around $311 million at the time, around $32 billion these days) and charged a possible 2.5 percent fee for transactions. "No one has ever been arrested just through Bitcoin taint, but it is possible and do you want to be the first?" he wrote on Helix's website to encourage people to use his underworld service, according to court documents [PDF].
"Most markets use 'Hot Wallets', they put all their fees in these wallets. [Law enforcement] just needs to check the taints on these wallets to find all the addresses a market uses." But things kicked up a notch in about November 2016 when Harmon entered into a partnership with Alphabay - then the largest bazaar for illegal goods on the dark web.
That souk was taken down in July 2017. A few months later, Harmon began to shut .
