A Deep Dive on ChipMixer

Update 16/3/2023: ChipMixer has been seized by the global authorities. We heavily suggest against using their service.

ChipMixer is one of the longest-running bitcoin mixers(the service was announced in 2017) that is pretty well-known on Bitcoin forums such as Bitcointalk. But the question is, it is actually safe, or is it a scam?

What’s a bitcoin mixer? 🔀

A bitcoin mixer is a service where the service would mix your bitcoin with the bitcoin of other people that are using their service, sort of like ‘tumble’ the coins around, and re-distribute back the coins to their respective orders. Due to the ‘mixing’, it will be significantly harder for blockchain analysts to track who the previous owners of the coins are.

In summary, bitcoin mixing is done to increase privacy. Remember — the Bitcoin blockchain is fully transparent.

is ChipMixer legitimate? 🤔

We’ve tested the ChipMixer mixing service ourselves multiple times in the span of a few months (to be sure if the service will work consistently) using very small amounts. Based on our experience — while the service can seem to be tricky to use for some people, the service seems to be really legitimate, and everything seemed to work perfectly.

Be cautious though, as the ChipMixer team seems to be fully anonymous. While anonymity is great for crypto founders due to security risks, anonymity can also be taken advantage of by hackers and scammers. Always watch out for rug pulls!

Scam allegations 🥷

We’ve dug deeper into looking at customer complaints, and a lot of people seem to be complaining about ChipMixer scamming them; but when we checked, these people making the complaints seem to be victims of fake ChipMixer websites.

Phishing is a very common way for scammers to steal other people’s funds — by them creating a fake website and baiting users to use their fake service.

You can take a deeper dive into cryptocurrency scams here.

Apparently when doing a Google search on “ChipMixer”, Google is displaying fake versions of ChipMixer in the search results, which causes a lot of people to get scammed.

Reporting the scam websites

If you have a few seconds of your spare time, we heavily recommend reporting these fake ChipMixer websites to decrease the chances of people getting scammed out of their bitcoin in the future.

You can help report these scam websites to Google here.

The legitimate website URL

Based on ChipMixer’s Bitcointalk forum post, the only legitimate ChipMixer website(besides their onion URLs) is chipmixer.com. So any other website you see on Google or on other websites are scams.

Though unfortunately, due to the controversial nature of ChipMixer’s business, you can only now use ChipMixer’s service using the Tor browser as per their website:

Final thoughts

Quick note: we are NOT endorsing ChipMixer.

Like with any other cryptocurrency online service, we always recommend people do ample amounts of research before handing over their money to these kinds of online services, as to hopefully significantly lower the chances of getting scammed.

To learn more about scams and security, please check our other articles on our homepage.