US DOJ Obtains Legal Ownership of $400 Million Tied to Infamous Bitcoin Mixer Helix
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has formally seized greater than $400 million in cryptocurrencies, actual property, and money linked to the Helix Bitcoin Mixer.
The forfeiture was finalized in late January 2026, concluding years of litigation towards Helix’s operator, Larry Dean Harmon.
Helix’s Illegal Activity and Harmon’s Case
Helix, which operated from 2014 to 2017, was marketed as a tumbling service designed to anonymize Bitcoin transactions. Investigators discovered that it had turn out to be a significant hub for laundering funds linked to drug trafficking, hacking, and different unlawful actions. Court filings show that Helix processed greater than 354,468 Bitcoin, valued at roughly $300 million on the time, for its customers.
Harmon, who additionally created the darknet search engine Grams, made the platform to combine immediately with main darknet markets. Its Application Programming Interface (API) allowed them to join the service to their Bitcoin withdrawal methods, incomes them a proportion of every transaction as fee and costs. Investigators additionally traced tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars} in illicit proceeds from a number of darknet markets by way of the blending service.
The Ohio-based operator of Helix was first charged in 2020 with cash laundering conspiracy and working an unlicensed cash transmitting enterprise. In August 2021, he pleaded responsible to conspiracy to commit cash laundering and was sentenced in November 2024 to 36 months in jail, three years of supervised launch, a financial forfeiture judgment, and seized belongings.
On January 21, 2026, Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a closing forfeiture order, formally transferring the belongings to the federal government.
Regulators Ease Crackdown on Crypto Mixers
The Helix case is an element of a broader regulatory crackdown on cryptocurrency mixers and privateness instruments. Platforms akin to Tornado Cash have additionally confronted sanctions and enforcement actions in recent times. While crypto advocates preserve that these companies can supply professional privateness protections, authorities proceed to deal with their potential use in prison exercise.
In a associated improvement, blockchain entrepreneur and Coin Center fellow Michael Lewellen filed a lawsuit final yr difficult the DOJ, in search of a ruling that his non-custodial crypto crowdfunding platform, Pharos, doesn’t violate cash transmission legal guidelines. The authorized motion argues that software program builders creating non-custodial privateness instruments are being unfairly focused.
The Justice Department later announced it might now not pursue prison instances towards crypto exchanges, builders, or customers for regulatory violations. This improvement follows the disbanding of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET), the specialised unit liable for investigating crypto-related prison exercise.
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