The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), in cooperation with the Central Office for Combating Internet Crime (ZIT), has dealt a severe blow to the “infrastructure of digital money launderers in the underground economy,” it said Friday. As part of the “Final Exchange” campaign, a total of 47 so-called Exchange Services hosted in Germany were shut down. These make it possible to exchange fiat and cryptocurrencies and are generally not illegal in Germany, as long as they operate according to the know-your-customer principle.

“The operators of the deactivated services are accused of deliberately concealing the origin of criminally obtained funds on a large scale through inadequate implementation of legal requirements and thus making themselves liable to prosecution for money laundering and the operation of criminal trading platforms on the Internet,” the BKA said in a statement, adding that it had seized extensive user and transaction data of the deactivated services.

“We see you”

Crypto exchanges that allow exchanges without a registration process and proof of identity are popular across borders in the digital underground. Cybercriminals use them, for example, to launder ransoms extorted as part of ransomware campaigns. According to the BKA, offers of this kind represent “one of the most relevant building blocks in the criminal value chain of the cybercrime phenomenon.”