After the cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash was sanctioned by the US Treasury, an anonymous individual decided to “troll” celebrities and well-known people in the crypto market.
This user is sending fractions of Ether (ETH) to the wallets of these “celebrities” from an account linked to Tornado Cash. Due to the sanction, this can cause problems for the recipients of cryptocurrencies.
Understand the case of Tornado Cash
On Monday US Treasury Department has banned Tornado Cash, a protocol that mixes crypto transactions. Although its focus of the service is privacy, the mixer has been used by various hacker groups and other criminals. For that, he suffered the penalty.
This means that all citizens of the country are prohibited from carrying out operations through the service. In addition, wallet addresses that used Tornado Cash were also targeted by sanctions.
That is, addresses cannot, in theory, carry out or receive transactions to and from any company or person residing in the US. But now someone has decided to “play” with this ban.
As Astaria CTO Joseph Delong noted on Twitter, someone is sending 0.1 ETH to a variety of crypto wallets from well-known people. That is, something around R$ 870.
The list includes, for example, EthHub co-founder Anthony Sassano; Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong; talk show host Jimmy Fallon; YouTuber Logan Paul; Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Randy Zuckerberg; the clothing brand Puma; a grant portfolio to Ukraine, and several others.
ETH is coming out of cryptocurrency wallets that were sanctioned yesterday by the US Treasury.
Someone is out dusting a bunch of wallets from Tornado with 0.1 ETH lmaaaaooooohttps://t.co/3NfLuz9qYF pic.twitter.com/xsmiyM8sxq
— joseph.eth (@josephdelong) August 9, 2022
“Someone is ‘dusting’ a bunch of Tornado Cash wallets with 0.1 ETH,” he tweeted.
Irony of the sanction case
The “joke” of the unknown user mocks the US decision to sanction an open source protocol and eventually punish people who interact, in any way, with it. After all, it is not possible to refuse to receive cryptocurrencies.
OFAC’s sanction rules mandate that Americans freeze any transactions or funds sent via Tornado Cash.
Many influential people in the crypto market protested the US decision. ShapeShift founder Erik Voorhees, for example, tweeted:
“Tornado Cash is not a person, nor a business entity. It is an open source software tool. Cannot be sanctioned, does not respond to subpoenas or legal requests. Instead, it’s privacy-seeking Americans that have been sanctioned,” he said.
