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.. 

How do mixers work? Do they use system similar to P2P if the number of coins of multiple users match each-other? Then it can create serious problems.

I know mixing is not money laundering but look at this:
1. Mixer receives money from someone who has done illegal activity.
2. Mixer stores that money on address A
3. I create a mixing order, deposit money to mixer and hours later I declare address B where I want to receive money.
4. Mixer sends me money from address A to address B. Address A has received money from someone who has done illegal activity, so there is a chain: Laundered money -> Address A -> Address B that belongs to me. This is probably what exchanges see and it's very hard to convince them that you are not associated with illegal activities.

OP did not even prove that using YoMix was the reason his account was blocked.
The mail from Uphold doesn't say anything about the reasons for the ban.

I'd say the outcome is still good for OP.
1. He will no longer have to use Uphold that has an ongoing class action lawsuit against them.
2. He will learn to use Mixers or will stop using them the wrong way. In both cases it's a +

If the amounts moved back and forth are small FBI won't even notice you OP.


Uphold is headquartered in New York, 6 W 18th St 3rd Floor, United States, and has 2 office locations.
https://craft.co/uphold/locations

Personally, I do not like the idea of mixing code. It is true that you must trust the mixer and that all the mixers currently in place are centralized, but using that code may mean collecting more data about you or that they do not delete the data as a worst-case scenario.


I don't think he would do that, and he didn't even try hard to defend his arguments.

Mixing is actually not money laundering, they're wrong to think it's a money laundering.

There's no different for using another wallet, it's a concealing and they can easily recognize if the funds was come from mixing service.

Yomix not owe anything to respond to this particular topic, it's a matter between him with Uphold.

@OP should change the title to "Warning, Uphold is refuse funds from mixer".

My first mixing experience was with https://[banned mixer] and they asked me to save my mixing code which I did, and the mixing process was very fine and successful. Though because of the mixing fee I chose, the transaction took about 7 hours but finally, I received alert of the coins. And from your story even at the first clause, you did not tell what really happened, you are hiding somethings and from my understanding, you are using alt-account and that cause part of your hiding story because you don't want to identify your real self. This is not a matter you use an alt-account for. You said you have not done it in any other platform, then you would have narrate everything happened so people would have called the attention of Yo!Mix here to verify but here, it is an allegation without prove that Yo!Mix was the one. That screenshot might be a transaction you had done at somewhere else.

With the fact that you also saw what the OP stated here, I am even closer to the opinion expressed by hugeblack

He is referring to this user who accused Yomix of supporting scammers because they did not want to stop the transaction when he bought a forum account from fraudsters.

Boilerplate nonsense. They only care about covering their own backs, nothing more. They don't care about preventing money laundering or combating terrorism or any of the other bullshit excuses they use. They care only about their own profits, and they don't care if you are wrongly accused or you lose your coins in the process.

Uphold, like most centralized exchanges, likely simply buy the services of a blockchain analysis company, and that blockchain analysis company tells them which coins are "tainted" and which ones are "clean", which coins to censor and which coins to accept. The reason they can't say any more on the subject is probably because they don't actually know why they are censoring your coins - they've been told to do it and so they will do it without question to protect themselves, and they don't care at all about the user on the other end.

I had to quote the whole paragraph because the logic of the argument is impeccable.

The only question I have for you and those of you who know more about the subject is, to what extent is the excuse that they give that they are simply doing it to comply with the law true? Even more so when they say that according to privacy and confidentiality laws they are not going to say anything more on the subject. On top of that I see that the Uphold company is based in London, which is the money laundering capital of the world for large amounts of money.

Londongrad: how the City became a money-laundering haven

Why is London money laundering capital of the world?

So let me get this straight - you used a mixer, the mixer mixed your coins exactly as they said you would, you deposited your coins on a centralized exchange, the centralized exchange decided to lock your account, and so you post a warning about the mixer? Your mistake wasn't in mixing your coins - your mistake was using a centralized exchange which attacks the very essence of bitcoin by treating it as non-fungible, by discriminating against certain coins, and by censoring certain outputs.

Why is no one questioning this? In what other scenario would this be even remotely logical?

I sold an old laptop to a friend for cash. I used the cash to pay a builder who was doing some work for me, and he disappeared without completing the job. Therefore, beware of selling things to my friend!
I traded cash for bitcoin using Bisq. A scammer on Telegram then convinced me to send them my bitcoin and I lost everything. Therefore, beware of using Bisq!

It is Uphold that you should be posting warning messages about, not any mixer. Uphold are the ones who are spying on your coins and locking your account.

Generally, most custodial platforms do not want you to be using a mixer with the money you have in there because that will get them into trouble with the government when people start abusing the service (you know, for actual money laundering and terrorism financing).

Some time ago there was even a high profile case of a Binance user who was made to promise to Binance that they would not use a mixer with their binance funds after their account was suspended for withdrawing to Wasabi wallet. So yeah, these wallets have a number against mixers for some reason.

I would not go as far as saying that OP is on an FBI watchlist, because 1) there is no guarantee that Upwork (same company that makes uphold) actually reports these activities to the FBI and 2) they are overwhelmed with leads, tips, and other received data that a single isolated mix isn't going to catch their attention.

The correct action by upwork would be to allow the OP to withdraw their funds, before closing the account if they wanted to terminate it.

Personal experience in using a mixer is not like what you described. Could I assume you don't know how to use it, I don't think that's possible. Can I assume you don't know the function of the mixer service, I don't think that's possible.
Except for fraudulent mixer services which make everything possible. AFAIK, for mixers like Yomix and several other mixers that are still active it is impossible for the mixer to give your information to other parties because it deviates from the purpose of the mixer.

There are many who make direct deposits from the mixing service to a central platform because the goal of the mixing service is to break the link between your inputs and your outputs and not to clean the coins (I do not want to use this word because there are no clean coins and dirty coins).
We also have more than 50 members participating in signature campaigns for mixing services, and no one complained. I think @OP is linked to an account that mistakenly copied a different address and when mixing to that address he blamed YoMix.

Don't mix up your own incompetence with someone else's. You don't use mixers to "clean" your coins, but to obfuscate your inputs and break the transaction trail on the blockchain. Obviously, by doing that, you end up with "someone else's" coins that might be linked to some shady activities.


That's nonsense! Jumping to conclusions about being on an FBI watchlist due to using a mixer is a bit of a stretch.

Before blaming YoMix for this hiccup, I believe you have omitted some fine details on your side!

• Has your Uphold account been active
• When was the last time you used your account besides this transaction
• What type of account do you hold with Uphold

Btw reading some of the terms of Uphold>>> https://uphold.com/en-us/legal/membership-agreement/general this could be anything to do with KYC, an inactive account, or their AML checks.

Have you been in touch with their support to try and understand what's happening with your account?

and visiting their Reddit page they seem to be a mess!


Am starting to think these guys operate similarly to Paypal where they limit accounts if they receive funds inconsistently and this could be what's happening here...
Just a quick question, how often have you(OP) been depositing funds here..has it been consentient ..if it were $50, $100 then jumped to $2000 am pretty sure they have every right to flag this transaction as its not your regular pattern and best to have a chat with their support, good luck.

Have you read their article
Why we sometimes have to block, restrict or close accounts - and how to reduce the risk

They stated that there are false positives in their assessment of one's account, have you asked for review of your account I doubt if you are immediately put on FBI's watch list you are creating your own ghost, until now no Chipmixer's customers are charged, so why you would you have that thinking that you are under FBI watch list right away.

Mixes bitcoins and then send to a centralized exchange. When his account is blocked, goes ahead to blame Yomix for putting him on FBI watch list. Who does that?
What was the point of mixing coins then if you were going to send them to a centralized exchange them?

OP, I don't know how long you have used crypto, but you have no one else to blame but yourself. If you want complete privacy and custody of your funds, then avoid centralized exchanges. Simple as that.

Call me cynical but I don't believe OP. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Recently registered account (zero posts), so he could say anything. "So why distrust him?" - well, that's because another user was attacking them after copy-pasting the wrong Bitcoin address (context) and then he created another post calling them a "potential honeypot" for revenge (context). I think there is a slight chance this is the same user trying to smear yomix.

Again:

I personally never got any account blocked after using mixers for many years (while I know this has probably happened with other people in the past).

Unless the mixing service is very poor (and as my last test, YOMIX was not) it is difficult or almost impossible for any exchange to be certain that deposits came from a mixer that works in the same way as YOMIX does.
All they will do is analyze the last 10 or 5 transactions, and if they are related to activities such as casinos, addresses on the blacklist, or others, your transaction may be marked badly.
Therefore, unless a careful analysis of your account is carried out, it is difficult for your account to be frozen simply because you used a mixer.

I think you made a mistake by doing the mixer service and then using an exchange wallet. It is clear that centralized exchanges have a rule of not accepting deposits from the results of the mixer service because this violates their rules which they consider to be money laundering.

I have used the Mixer service several times but never sent it directly to a centralized exchange because I knew it would be dangerous if it was detected and the balance would be held, use another wallet to be safer, but this is not entirely YoMix's fault because the Uphold exchange itself has strict regulations.

Last time i checked Yomix is one of the best mixer out there with a lot of users and this is my first time of hearing complaint about the Yomix mixer. I would say you checked your your address again but Yomix supports a lot of addresses including SegWit, Taproot, Legacy, and Bech32, so that should not be the issue. The issue is obviously from your Uphold account perhaps there are some other transactions you did that was related to the claim by Uphold. I still don't know why they wont give you a complete feedback on what may occur, giving excuses to laws and regulation. The reasons for supports is to response to feedback.

AFAIK, the message given to you by uphold is the typical description when user caught using mixer to deposit on their platform. You check their ToS if they forbid the use of mixer to deposit since some centralized services that usually involves fiat as main currency is very strict on mixers. We have centralized service too in my country that doesn’t allowed funds coming from gambling, mixer and other platform which can be use to launder except exchange.

There’s no way to filter out Bitcoin that being watch by FBI since there’s no such sign like that to determine tainted Bitcoin unless you knew the watchlist of FBI.

When you are using mixers you need to be creative. I think it's depend on individual experience level. Personally I will not give up my strategy and want someone else to adopt it to make it became common. I use mixers a lot even in the recent time I used one of the mixer [not calling the name for obvious reason] that is advertising on the forum. Thankfully I never had any such experience.

Besides when there are no information given to show/prove the validity of the reason they gave, it's hard to make a conclusion too.

When the ChipMixer was seized by the FBI^[1], there were many chips that were withdrawn before and were later deposited in the exchanges, and we did not hear from anyone complaining about problems related to depositing those funds. Note that the chipmixer was seized by the FBI, which is something that did not happen with YoMix.

you should ask Uphold account about the reason for freezing the account and tell them about the source of the funds, as the account may have been closed by mistake or for any reason.
In general, if another member complained about depositing YoMIX to the Uphold account and it was closed for the same reason, here we can say that there is a problem with the mixer.

Do you have any link to @brace the mace ?

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-investigation-leads-takedown-darknet-cryptocurrency-mixer-processed-over-3#:~:text=The%20operation%20involved%20U.S.%20federal,than%20%2446%20million%20in%20cryptocurrency

I read the email, and it did not says anywhere that the amount is being funded from some terrorism account. I assume you are new to mixers, as you already said in your post, and then you should know that, many CEXs don't accept payments from mixers. You have to understand that if CEXs are positive terminal then Mixers are negative terminals. Means they are opposite to each other.

They are both against each other purposes. CEXs shows your identity and ask it and will share it with feds while Mixers don't do that, at least it is what they say.

I was going to say the same, and I thought OP might know it, and did the whole thing on purpose, but I can not conclude until I know the whole story and It is not something new, few days ago, some member was trying to say the same, that yomix is a product of Cops, haha, I mean, really, if it then provides some proofs, all they are coming with, these useless statements.

Well, lets see, what comes next.

@OP I'm sorry to say this, but it's really stupid if you link mixed coins to centralized exchange because centralized exchange will never want to accept sources from a mixer. Even you send your mixed coins to your non custodial wallet before you send to the centralized exchange, it will not remove anything since it's called as "concealing a transaction".

So if you want to mix your coins, you must cash out through no KYC P2P, direct P2P or DEX.

Is it meaningless to try to explain them that you just exchanged your coins and you have no idea that your bitcoins are tagged? How can you know whether incoming coins have gone through something bad? This is something beyond your capabilities. Maybe their system did a false positive? How can they be so sure that your coins are bad?

This doesn't make any sense. Anybody can claim that your coins are bad without any reason and tell you they can't show you proofs because of confidentiality laws.

Btw, did you choose max mixing level on yomix? Did you enable random amount of transactions with high service fee and some hours of transfer delay? This would increase your anonimity.

Btw mixtum.io claims to send you coins from exchanges that make you not to worry about bad funds. Mixero.io uses monero bridge and logically should offer you high anonimity. There is also a cryptomixer.io that has been on market for centuries with proven reserves of more than 2000 bitcoins and I haven't heard anyone saying bad about them.

I recently did an in person transaction and got paid in BTC. Honestly it wasn't anything shady but who knows where these coins were previously... So I thought to use a mixer before cashing out. I have an Uphold account for many many years and never had any issues, so I just mixed my coins with YoMix and deposited there. This was my first transaction I did in Uphold since 3 years ago and in the very next day I get this email. No other transactions were done in the meantime so it's certain this is related to YoMix.
https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/10/16/R1ksa.png
This would mean that the address YoMix used too give me funds immedietly got detected as being connected to terrorism financing. It's well beyond me how a "bitcoin mixer's" developers could be so incompetent.
So I guess thanks YoMix for putting me on an FBI watchlist. Be warned anyone. If it's so easy for an exchange to detect a bitcoin "mixer" it sure as hell means that it's not an actual mixer.