Helix darknet Bitcoin 'mixer' will fork over $750M, serve time, for processing 1M+ transactions

The operator of Helix, a darknet Bitcoin cryptocurrency laundering service once favored by online drug dealers worldwide, is ordered to forfeit more than $750 million in funds and assets as part of a three-year prison sentence.

On Friday, 41-year-old Larry Dean Harmon of Akron, Ohio, was sentenced to three years in prison for running the Helix crypto ‘mixing’ operation in Washington, DC courts.

Federal prosecutors say Harmon – who was highly sought after by darknet druglords – laundered more than $311 million worth of bitcoin for customers, both globally and in the DC area, between 2014 to 2017.

“Helix operated what is commonly referred to as a ‘mixer’ or ‘tumbler’ of the convertible virtual currency bitcoin – charging customers to send bitcoin to a designated address in a manner designed to conceal and obfuscate the source or owner of the bitcoin,” prosecutors said.

Harmon is said to have conducted over 1,225,000 transactions using multiple crypto wallet addresses associated with his operation.

“Helix was one of the most popular mixing services on the darknet and was highly sought after by online drug dealers who needed to launder their illicit proceeds,” the US Department of Justice (DoJ) said.

The millions in dollars total was equal to approximately 354,468 BTC at the time of each transaction, for which Harmon would take a percentage of for processing, and for running the Helix mixing site.

Harmon was also said to have been the creator, administrator, and primary operator of Grams, a darknet search engine that he connected to Helix in order to support all of the major darknet markets at the time.

Grams advertised itself as the “Google of the Darkweb” and also indexed darknet .onion pages for vendors of illicit goods such as narcotics, illegal firearms, and stolen Personally Identifiable Information (PII), court documents showed.

By creating an Application Program Interface (API) integrating the two services – often referred to as “Grams-Helix” – criminals could access their bitcoin withdrawal systems on the dark markets directly with Helix.

Harmon customized various features of Helix to ensure compatibility with significant illegal markets such as AlphaBay, also shut down in 2017, DoJ officials said, allowing FBI investigators to trace tens of millions of dollars straight from the dark markets to the mixing service.

Besides prison, Harmon was sentenced to three years of supervised release and will have to pay the courts exactly $311,145,854 in fines.

The crypto mixer was further ordered to forfeit seized cryptocurrencies, real estate, and monetary assets worth over $400 million.

Created 'Venmo for Bitcoin'

Harmon will be forced to pay an additional $60 million civil penalty – handed down in a coordinated case by the US Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) for violating the Bank Secrecy Act.

The FinCEN case filings show that In 2017, Harmon registered corporate papers in Delaware for another money services venture, "Coin Ninja", and is listed as the business’s CEO.

“Coin Ninja offers a service called DropBit, which describes itself as “like Venmo for Bitcoin” allowing customers to accept and transmit bitcoin through text messages or Twitter handles,” the court documents stated.

On the site, Coin Ninja clearly stated it provided a crypto “mixing” service and touted the reasons for tumbling crypto in an “FAQ” section titled “Why should I mix my bitcoins?” the filing said.

Harmon was said to have also advertised Coin Ninja’s DropBit service on Reddit as “a service that helps circumvent know your customer procedures.” Randomly, CoinNinja (and DropBit) is still listed on LinkedIn as an 'IT services and IT consulting firm.'

Harmon had pleaded guilty to the DoJ’s money laundering conspiracy charges in 2021.

The Bank Secrecy Act was passed by US Congress in 1970, one of the first laws in the nation to fight money laundering.