The Sodinokibi Ransomware has started to accept the Monero cryptocurrency to make it harder for law enforcement to track ransom payments and plans to stop allowing bitcoin payments in the future.
In a 2019 webinar titled "The functionality of privacy coins", Europol stated that the use of both Tor and Monero made it impossible to trace the funds or the actors who received them.
“Since the suspect used a combination of TOR and privacy coins, we could not trace the funds. We could not trace the IP addresses. Which means, we hit the end of the road. Whatever happened on the Bitcoin blockchain was visible and that’s why we were able to get reasonably far. But with Monero blockchain, that was the point where the investigation has ended. So this is a classical example of one of several cases we had where the suspect decided to move funds from Bitcoin or Ethereum to Monero," Europol's Jerek Jakubcek said in
a webinar.
