German Police confiscates $38 million from eXch

German authorities confiscated $38 million worth of cryptocurrency from eXch, a platform purportedly used to launder money stolen during Bybit’s historic $1.04 billion hack. The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) of Germany and the primary prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt announced the seizure on May 9. It involved several cryptocurrency assets, including Bitcoin , marking the third-largest crypto confiscation in the BKA’s history. Along with shutting down the platform, the announcement stated that authorities also confiscated eXch’s German server infrastructure, which contained over eight terabytes of data. According to the statement, the BKA defined eXch as a “swapping” service that facilitated the exchange of different cryptocurrency assets without the need for Anti-Money Laundering (AML) procedures. The platform reportedly enabled $1.09 billion in cryptocurrency transfers, some of which were thought to have a “criminal origin,” including money laundered during the Bybit hack. Crypto expert ZachXBT claimed in a post that eXch was also responsible for laundering millions of dollars from other cryptocurrency thefts and exploits, such as Multisig, FixedFloat, and the $243 million Genesis creditor theft. According to ZachXBT, those incidents were in addition to “countless phishing drain services over the past few years with refusal to block addresses and freeze orders.” eXch, which previously denied any role in laundering Bybit hack funds, announced its closure by May 1 in a post on Bitcoin Talk The organization decided there was no point in carrying on with such operations in a hostile environment where SIGINT targets them because of misinterpreted objectives, even after unsuccessful attempts to dismantle their infrastructure