Topic: YoMix warning (Read 559 times)

Exchanges normally have only one deposit address per user. Address reuse weakens the effectiveness of mixing.

Centralized exchanges look several hops back from your deposit transaction so if they have a problem with mixers you won't be able to get around a possible penalization by simply sending mixed funds to yourself and then to the exchange.

That's a no-no, using mixers directly to any centralized crypto entity is a no-no move. Government are well aware on mixers and most of the times this regulated platform are required to follow the aml standards on where these platform are based which has always the same policy regarding to mixers. In fact there are many experiments, threads asking questions about this kind of transactions and it's not recommended of doing so, ever.

You mean this kind of list? Scams Bitcoin Mixers List and Services closed.

But in any case, there could still be a lot that is not yet found, and most likely like a copy cat of the original, the UI and feel of the websites. Nevertheless they could be just a phishing site as well so everyone should be very careful.

When we talk about reputable mixers, we have a few of them advertising on this forum and most of them are good ones. If i were ever to mix my coins through mixers. i would use the one of them and also the one i am advertising at my signature/avatar is good mixer.

By the way, is there a list of mixers which are NOT to be trusted ones ?

Yes. You can use a reputable mixer then send the coins to your centralized exchange without any problems.
If the mixer is decent enough then the decentralized service will only know the address from which the coins come from but they will never know your actual address.
To summarize, the service provider may and can realize that you have used a mixer but they can't figure out which address the funds actually came from.

Well, i too thought that we can mix the coins and can put the withdrawal address of any centralized exchange to get the coins which are not linked with our input address, but after reading the comments here, i would refrain from doing so.

Also if i mix the coins and get the non linked coins on my new wallet and from that new wallet i deposit to a centralized exchange will the CEX not mind that ? Can't they see now that the coins were mixed before and then moved to the CEX  (although not directly moved from Mixer to the CEX)

Mixers can utilize coinjoin as well as doing several transaction with new addresses in the outputs to span out their transaction tree and make it harder for detection software and/or sleuths to locate fund origin. Of course this is expensive and many mixers will just do what you describe without and steps in the middle.

At it's most basic, a mixer will pay you with someone else's money just so the trace of your initial BTC ends up going somewhere else. But if a mixer is only doing the latter of the afformentioned however they run into the risk of their users receiving tainted coins which can't at all be used in many services as with OP and might end up getting whoever deals with these coins watched or suspended... However, even with the techniques I mentioned at first, it's still possible for the more sophisticated software to detect fund origin.

Thank you for sharing that bro, it's a rather bad news for you since it will be hard for you to use Uphold now and for this mixing service, but it's a rather good one for Uphold. It shows they don't try to scam people by asking endless KYC in order to keep the funds for themselves when they spot "dubious" transactions(at least from their point of view). But why did you use a mixing service if it's not too intrusive?

I totally agree with you, mixers are a very risky service as a lot of people have pointed out on this forum, you lose custody of your funds during the mixing process and you have to trust the mixer to pay to your receiving address, it is similar to centralized exchanges on the basis of trust, you could deposit your funds in any of these services and lose it, because you lost custody of it. People who use mixers should be aware of this, and if you want a self custodial privacy protection service, use CoinJoin.

For a mixer to be effective you must have a sufficiently large pool of users to provide better obfuscation. The more participants there are the more complex it becomes to link an output to specific prior activity. Exchanges might decide they will just blanket ban all coins coming from mixers or sometimes they will use an algorithm to assign a score and if it is determined your coins are too dirty they will close your account.

Well, we have to agree with TryNinja that this thread is nothing but a part of smearing campaigns against mixers and specifically Yo!Mix.
OP created a new account complaining a certain situation and blamed a particular service fir it but he never came back to answer any of our questions! Thus looks the same as topics started by newbies asking you "I won xxx dollars from this platform, is this platform legit"

To OP, a mixers role is to break the connection between the sending address and the receiving address, that's all. No matter what mixing technique you use (except for chipmixer), any one who would look up the receipient address would realise that the coins have been mixed.
Next time, other than thinking only about mixing your coins to hide your traces, think about "plausible deniability": anyone can see that your coins are coming from a mixer (specifically centralized services) but none of them can prove it's you who have used the mixing service.

The OP provided no evidence of his claims except for the screenshot, which is more than suspicious, where Uphold informs him about the account closure. He did not offer any proof that the closing of the account was due to tainted coins or that these coins came from the Yomix service. That is why his claims must be considered with a great deal of reserve, he registered an account to make such accusations.

Shouldn't mixers be miner as well to consolidate hundreds of transactions by including all the balance as fees and receive untainted coins?
And how can you say a coin came from x or y mixer, aren't they supposed to be a privacy providing service?
If you or anyone other than the mixer knows the origin of a transaction, it's not a mixer then, is a honeypot.

But since they never claimed or mentioned the name, it seems that mixer is not doing his job correctly, they shouldn't even give you someone els's coins who used their services before, what they should give you must 100% come from another source.

But if you think about it, is there a way to identify all the tainted coins and determine whether they came from the original culprit or just an unsuspected user?

Anyways, if you have nothing serious to hide, you should follow up on your case and file a complaint, at the end you will win if you can prove you didn't do anything wrong. Then you could expose that exchange for being a "legitimate" scammer.

I wouldn't take any exchange's warnings at face value. They all subscribe to 3rd party alerts, who all use software originating from the same source. It's called cheap AML compliance.

I would say, however, you learnt a couple of lessons here:
- break the on-chain link with services, no matter CEX, casino, or mixer. It only involves one extra transaction, costs next to nothing, and helps preserve your privacy. 90% of services don't look beyond previous tx.
- Yomix obviously needs to improve their own privacy measure and break their on-chain link.

Literally any mixer could freeze any order for whatever reason known to man. And it's not like this hasn't happened before.
From admins going AWOL to simply not caring to maintain their systems, all the way to outright scams. Mixers are also a 100% centralized and trust based system. There's not any documentation proving that they're better at what they claim to do than a simple exchange.

I've send mixed coins by mistake to Bitstamp, there was another CM campaign user that did so just like me without a problem, I think another one sent them to Biannce and yet we have no issues with it even after CM was taken down.
It ala comes down to the mixer, the sum of funds, and the user, if you're a guy who just deposited $100 a month and then you're spending $30k obviously you're going to trigger flag but for small sums with the correct mixing, nobody is going to give you any headaches.


How do you get the funds there in the first place?
That's what OP tried and got into the troubles were seeing!


And we have hundreds of stories from these no KYC exchanges that suddenly decide your funds are suspicious and ask you for every single possible document, knowing all to well you will not be able to provide them and just freeze your coins. To whom are you going to complain? File a report against a company in Cayman Island or Bahamas?  


Lol, you got me there for a moment I didn't realize it was an example and I was like wtf, o_e_l_e_o getting scammed over telegram?  

There's still plenty of exchanges that don't require any form of documentation for "Know Your Customer" regulations if you're dealing with crypto-only transactions.
Might sound odd but almost no country has come up with a full framework for crypto regulation, let alone fully enforcing it. For instance, even people from the U.S. can access most Chinese exchanges to this day, and exchange crypto-to-crypto without passing any checks.

Think about it, any top-10 exchange will have billions worth of BTC circulated through its systems every month. Yes, the receiving parties will be able to trace that the BTC might have passed through the exchange, but the origin of these funds is going to be as obscure as possible.

Compared to the average mixer, that circulates at best a few thousand BTC at any given time, no matter how much a mixer tries, it'll never be able to be as obscure about origin and "cleanness" of funds. Hell, even North Korea's Lazarous group is known to be laundering tons and tons of money they hacked from DeFi through no-KYC exchanges.

If OP here had made a single pass-through from a no-KYC exchange there's no way Uphold would have detected him. On the contrary, the mixer got detected in spite of all its efforts and hefty fee.
To think that Uphold, being as incompetent as they are, has systems in place to detect mixers, it's sure as hell is pretty rudimentary to detect such transactions except if the mixing service is exceptional at what it's doing and also has clean coins at hand. Which I doubt they would just hand over to any run in the mill customer doing small transactions like that.

If a transaction has happened then it is impossible for the exchange to prove that that bitcoin has not changed hands in a completely legal and legitimate transaction. Look back far enough and every bitcoin in active circulation could be "tainted" by some algorithm or another. Every bank note in active circulation is probably the same. The problem here is not where the coins came from - the problem here is the centralized exchange making arbitrary, unprovable, and almost certainly false assumptions about OP's coins with zero retribution.

No, it doesn't. It provides the exchange with a 100% provable link between your coins and your KYCed identity and provides absolutely zero privacy whatsoever.

This appears too biased and blown out of proportion. This might not have anything to do with the mixer.

Having a transaction after 3 years of inactivity could be flagged as suspicious. Most, if not all, centralized platforms' trigger system would detect it as an unusual activity. Even here on the forum, a sort of a warning would appear on the profile of an account that has just "recently woke up from a long period of inactivity." And that's even just after 6 months of inactivity, if I'm not mistaken.

Assuming that the closure of your account is due to terrorism financing is a bit of an exaggeration. If it were so, your funds would have been frozen and you wouldn't have been allowed to get your money back.

Anyway, I'm curious how Uphold's automated reply fails on grammar.

Having a mixer be detected could potentially mean bad opsec from the mixer's side. It's true that oftentimes mixers are used by people with notorious purposes, but the issue here is that the mixer can't simply disregard coins it received from people that end up making illegal transactions that could even be traced later.

However, the mixer's mistake lies in the fact that they didn't bother to actually "mix" the coins enough so as they can't be detected from whatever basic heuristic detection an automated exchange could be using. So by warnings like these I would indeed try to stay away from a service that doesn't fulfill it's basic function. A mixers job isn't just giving you coins that aren't yours. It's to give you coins whose origin isn't so easily detected... If they fail at that it's like a plane that can't take off. Seems nice but not very useful.

It seems as though OP learned the hard way that some mixer services simply don't care to output coins that are even more tainted and more easily traceable than what you might have put in... But that's not to say that the perfect mixer exists. Bitcoin tracing methods have been getting better. Oddly enough in the end using unorthodox methods like withdrawing from an exchange makes for better and also much cheaper mixing..