Sinbad Sanctions – BitMixList

Sinbad.io appeared in late 2022 as a high-volume custodial mixer marketed around speed, adjustable delays, and support for larger transfers. The rollout was aggressive: signature campaigns on Bitcointalk, Telegram promotion, and private outreach to OTC intermediaries who could direct flow quickly. From day one, researchers compared the service to Blender.io because of repeated overlaps in campaign assets, wording, and infrastructure behavior.

This page tracks the full enforcement arc: launch patterns, Lazarus-linked tracing claims, coordinated seizure activity, and the November 2023 OFAC designation that placed multiple Sinbad-linked identifiers on the SDN list. It is written as a practical reference for exchanges, OTC desks, wallet teams, and investigators who need a clear chronology and actionable controls.

Sinbad Launch and Lazarus Links

Open-source and commercial tracing firms reported that Sinbad activity overlapped with clusters already associated with Lazarus-linked laundering routes. Public reports connected portions of Horizon and Ronin theft flows to Sinbad entry points and then toward exchange off-ramps, which fit a pattern already discussed in the wider sanctions timeline.

Analysts also argued that Sinbad reused enough legacy wallet and campaign infrastructure to accelerate attribution. If those links were accurate, the reuse helped early growth but reduced operational cover, because investigators could start from known Blender-era anchors rather than building a fresh map from zero.

Europol and FIOD Seize Sinbad

Dutch authorities at FIOD, working with Europol and U.S. counterparts, announced action against Sinbad infrastructure and related assets. The operation followed the now-familiar cross-border model: coordinated warrants, server capture, wallet tracking, and parallel information requests to infrastructure providers and trading venues.

For compliance teams, the operational lesson is straightforward. Once a mixer investigation moves into coordinated seizure mode, response times shrink dramatically and requests for logs, wallet associations, and communications history arrive in parallel. The same pattern appears in other takedown pages, including ChipMixer.

OFAC’s November 2023 Designation

On November 29, 2023, U.S. Treasury sanctioned Sinbad and published a detailed set of linked identifiers. The designation included not only transaction addresses but also domains, aliases, and promotional payment trails, which signaled that enforcement attention now extends beyond core mixer wallets into the surrounding business ecosystem.

That scope matters for exchanges and OTC desks. It means screening programs must cover marketing and affiliate pathways, not just obvious deposit endpoints, and teams need complete evidence trails showing when alerts were triggered, blocked, escalated, and reported.

Operational Lessons for Privacy Users

Sinbad shows how sanctions pressure often unfolds in stages: early tracing, public designations, infrastructure action, then follow-on screening by exchanges and banks. Users who treated the service as a clean break from earlier sanctioned mixers still faced downstream exposure when links were later mapped and published.

If you use custodial privacy services, treat outages and payout anomalies as risk signals. Keep clear records of deposit addresses, preserve proof of funds origin, and have a fallback route ready before a sanction event lands. In practice, preparation determines whether a review is resolved quickly or becomes a long account freeze.

Compliance Checklist

Compliance desks, OTC brokers, and even active peer-to-peer traders need repeatable routines, not generic policy language. Treat this checklist as a working control set and revisit it after each sanctions update or infrastructure incident.

Screen every UTXO with tools like the BitMixList AML Checker before sending it to a custodial venue, and archive the screenshots or CSV hits for future audits.
Document how you block SDN-listed addresses if you operate infrastructure or OTC services, including which wallets or nodes auto-reject flagged inputs and where manual overrides live.
Monitor marketing partners and affiliate programs. OFAC noted that Sinbad’s forum promotions tied promoter wallets to sanctioned addresses, so track payouts, public handles, and domains used for campaigns.
Align incident response plans with hardware inventories. If authorities seize a data center, know which wallets, CRM systems, and email gateways were affected so you can notify customers in hours, not days.

The Sinbad case reinforces a hard reality: when a mixer is linked to nation-state laundering narratives, enforcement escalation is fast and cross-jurisdictional. If you rely on custodial privacy tools, plan for abrupt takedowns and apply OFAC controls immediately if you are a U.S. person or U.S.-exposed business.

References

The primary sources below support the chronology and are useful for due diligence, incident reporting, and internal compliance training.

Once again: do not use mixers for illicit activity, and never interact with addresses that appear on sanctions lists.

Author

NotATether

Bitcoin privacy researcher and maintainer of BitMixList. Focused on mixer history, enforcement timelines, and practical privacy workflows for users operating in high-friction jurisdictions.