Tweet One of the kingpins of Silk Road, the online darknet drug market that operated with Bitcoin, and its alleged CEO, Roger Clark, a Canadian, pled guilty on Thursday in New York to conspiracy to distribute narcotics. He faces a term of incarceration of 20 years. Clark was extradited from Thailand in 2018, and was […]
Tweet A few weeks ago in China, several digital currency exchanges announced that they were suspending trading or shutting down operations altogether, leaving the recovery of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of funds with those exchanges up in the air, and this after approximately US$3 billion went missing from two initial coin offerings (“ICOs“) […]
Tweet Russian on OFAC list launches a coin The Kharon Brief has an interesting article here about a Ukrainian named Aleksei Muratov, also spelled Aleksey Muratov, on the US sanctions list here, who founded, launched and owns an initial coin offering called PRIZM. PRIZM whitepaper The PRIZM coin in the Ukraine has a white paper […]
Tweet Canadian ICO founder arrested; investors all over the world may be out at least $80 million A Canadian from Montreal, Quebec, named Aziz Com Mirza, was arrested in Dubai on October 27, 2019, and is chilling in the Al Awir jail, on allegations of running a Ponzi scheme. Mirza founded a Canadian initial coin […]
Tweet Ex parte injunction The Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC“) announced today that it filed an emergency application ex parte in US Federal District Court in Manhattan, and after a hearing, obtained a temporary order over the initial coin offering (“ICO“) launched by Telegram Group, Inc. (“Telegram“), the messaging application, which raised $1.7 billion from investors […]
Tweet Bridgemark and Blockchain Two Canadian Blockchain companies based in Vancouver, BLOK Technologies Inc. (“Blok“) and Cryptobloc Technologies Corp. (“Cryptobloc“) have been caught up as part of the so-called Bridgemark scandal affecting Vancouver’s capital markets. The Bridgemark situation started in November 2018, when the Executive Director of the BC Securities Commission announced that he had […]
Tweet Exchange owner killed The co-founder of a Bitcoin exchange called BitMarket, was found murdered in Poland, after the exchange closed, citing a lack of liquidity. Allegedly, over $23 million in customer funds is unaccounted for. Tobiasz Niemiro was found with a bullet in his head in the woods a few hours from Warsaw. Although […]
Tweet The US Attorney for the Northern District of California, on behalf of the US Treasury, has filed a civil complaint against the Bitcoin exchange known as BTC-e and one of its alleged owners / officers, Alexander Vinnik, to enforce over $100 million in monetary penalties for a series of anti-money laundering law violations. BTC-e […]
Tweet Working with Europol, several law enforcement agencies shut down a Bitcoin mixing and anonymizing service called Bestmixer, which was one of the largest mixing services for digital currencies. Mixing and anonymizing services or anonymizing exchanges process digital currencies on behalf of customers in order to make it difficult to trace the digital currencies. The […]
Tweet In furtherance of the US approach to responsible innovation, the Financial Action Task Force (“FATF“)’s private sector consultation in Vienna two weeks ago, will help drive changes to FATF Recommendation 15 to bring digital currencies, ICOs, and digital currency exchanges more fully into the AML requirements in June 2019. The Vienna change will take […]