We recently reported on Bitcoin Arab about a travel company paying $4.5 million in Bitcoin as a ransom to a group of hackers.

The hackers, who got the money, laundered $1.5 million worth of about 155 bitcoins using well-known cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, according to a recent report from Zingo.

The hackers got this amount after an attack using the famous “Ragnar Locker ransomware” where the ransomware encrypted the data on the computers of the travel company CWT and threatened to reveal the data they obtained to the world or pay a ransom to avoid it.

CWT, which generated $1 billion in revenue in 2019, had no choice but to pay hackers $4.5 million worth of bitcoin.

Read:US authorities join investigation into fraud of a cryptocurrency exchange

Surprisingly, some of this huge amount was laundered through Binance, Huobi, Coinbase, and others.

It is also strange that all the money paid in the hackers’ address went through Coinbase instead of the usual mixer used by the fraudsters.

Initially, the attackers’ initial bitcoin address was 13nmJ3SsNB5pSyQrmX3e6zveY9kHGw8Vs3, but when ZenGo traced the address, it discovered that it had been split into addresses with lower bitcoin sizes, ranging from 1 to 10 bitcoin.

CWT purchased 414 bitcoins to pay the ransom to the attackers, and 1 bitcoin was transferred first to the initial account before transferring the rest to validate the threats.

The moment the hackers confirmed receipt of the first payment, CWT transferred the remaining 413 bitcoins.

According to the report, one of the addresses used was that 310 bitcoins were split into two equal halves and 155 bitcoins were transferred through Binance, although the know-a-client mechanism used on the platform did not stop the process.

While some experts say that hackers did not use the trading platforms as the report tells.

Others argue that mixing 414 bitcoins using a blender takes too much time, and thus the hackers decided to use Binance and other trading platforms in a roundabout way that enabled them to bypass censorship.

Read:A new scam managed to steal a billion dollars in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies

CWT made the transaction on June 28, and what followed was more than 20 transactions within 30 minutes that enabled the hackers to launder $1.5 million.

The remaining 155 bitcoins were transferred to other exchanges, including Huobi and Poloniex.

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