You can send a ton of really small transactions (colloquially referred to as "crypto dust") for an insignificant amount of money to innocent wallets from a single tainted wallet. The "tainted wallet" in this case would be one tied to Tornado Cash. The Treasury, having sanctioned TornadoCash, now considers the targeted wallet as having done business with a sanctioned entity.
This is currently uncharted territory. Currently, you can get banned by exchanges if your account has any interaction with mixers like tornado. There's no precedent in regards to how the government views accounts tainted by attacks like this.
What is "your account"? There's no "first-last name, date of birth, ID number" attached to an ethereum account unless an account is on a centralized exchange.
Generating a new account is a matter of 2 seconds.
Ethereum wallets work like a bank account that anyone can deposit funds into. This dusting attack would be as if, say, Iran or North Korea decided to start depositing a few dollars into every American's checking accounts to try and implicate the entire country's citizenry in financial crime.
Bitcoin has one defense against this attack: coin control. The way Bitcoin works is as if every time you wrote a check, you had to also include a list of all the other checks that the money comes from. So you can technically avoid implicating yourself in financial crime by not writing "payable by Iran/NK super hackerz" on your checks.
> Bitcoin has one defense against this attack: coin control. The way Bitcoin works is as if every time you wrote a check, you had to also include a list of all the other checks that the money comes from. So you can technically avoid implicating yourself in financial crime by not writing "payable by Iran/NK super hackerz" on your checks.
Isn't this terrible for freedom? When I pay with fiat, I don't have to include a list of where that fiat came from.
Can you imagine having some savings in crypto and getting unknowingly dusted by this attack, only to find your Coinbase account and your bank account suddenly frozen a few weeks later and not having any idea why or what to do about it?