This guy was noticed because tumbled crypto was sent back to his main and publicly known wallet. Obviously he did lots of other careless things (e.g. operate sock puppet accounts that did nothing but do early buys of OpenSea front page NFT). But couldn’t he have at least sent the money to other anonymous wallets and then cash out?
- Fund your brand new eth account by swapping from XMR via a DEX
- do the shenanigans
- exit your ETH back into XMR via the DEX
- do whatever with the XMR?
Of course there's a lot more when it comes to metadata leakage and there is a lot to learn before you can use XMR with a high degree of privacy.
You also have to remember that this guy was caught by fairly basic on-chain research by crypto Twitter so even some basic measures could have saved him, or could have prevented the charges which may not have been brought against him if it wasn't a slam-dunk case with such obvious evidence.
No. The only information the blockchain would give you in the proposed "anonymous cash out" scenario is
1. Someone bought ETH on a CEX
2. They then transferred the ETH to a newly created wallet
3. They then did the mentioned NFT trades
4. They then transferred the money back to a CEX wallet
Given only public information, there is no way to identify the individual.
You have to have access to the CEX's (obviously) private database to know who purchased the original ETH and who transferred the arguably ill-gotten gains back to the exchange.
Given only public information? Well in that case we are all anonymous. If you do illegal shenanigans you should assume all information can be used against you.
