One or more unknown persons made several ETH transfers from Tornado Cash, which was sanctioned by the US authorities a day earlier. Jimmy Fallon, Shaquille O'Neal, PUMA, Brian Armstrong, Steve Aoki, Beeple and other famous people and companies received 0.1 ETH from anonymous.
The day before, the US Treasury Department from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), imposed sanctions against the popular Tornado Cash cryptomixing service and associated Ethereum addresses.
Thus, US individuals and legal entities are now prohibited from using Tornado Cash and interacting with any addresses associated with the project. For willful non-compliance with sanctions, US citizens and companies can be punished with a fine of $50,000 to $10,000,000 or imprisonment for a period of 10 to 30 years.
The sender(s) may have wanted to draw the attention of law enforcement agencies to the recipient persons. However, Treasury sanctions suggest "willful" interaction with addresses of smart contracts from the blacklist as a precondition for possible criminal prosecution. Thus, it is unlikely that receiving tokens from Tornado Cash free of charge, without any participation, may be a violation of sanctions.
Circle, Github, as well as Web 3.0 development platforms Alchemy and Infura.io Today, Tornado Cash addresses were blacklisted and access to the application was banned.
A few months earlier, Tornado Cash announced the blocking of banned OFAC addresses on the platform in order to limit the possibility of attackers using the service to launder stolen cryptocurrencies. However, Tornado co-founder Roman Semenov explained that blocking is provided only at the frontend level, restrictions can be circumvented directly through a smart contract.
