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 was […]
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 purpose […]
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 effect […]
Canadian Parliamentarian Dan Albas, has introduced Bill C-452 in Parliament today which would allow holders of cryptocurrency to make charitable donations in crypto to Canadian charities and get a tax credit for their donations. The short but powerful amendment to the Income Tax Act, amends §38(a.1) to include crypto as an approved category for the purposes […]
The Spanish Guardia Civil has arrested eight people and seized over €9 million, luxury cars, cannabis plants and jewellery in connection with an alleged money laundering operation in Spain that involved the use of Bitcoin ATMs and digital currency exchanges to launder proceeds of crime and avoid the filing of suspicious transaction reports. According to […]
Two Bitcoin-related alleged drug traffickers living large and spending above their reported incomes In the last few months, the Australian Federal Police have arrested two well-known Bitcoin guys suspected of leading secret lives as international drug traffickers. Both alleged to the public that they had real jobs, one operating a digital currency exchange and the other an IT business, […]
On Tuesday, Iranian officials spoke to the Iranian media and confirmed that a government organization – Iran Telecommunication Research Center – has 4 Blockchain projects in progress that have looked at using Blockchain for policy making, threat management and business use cases for Iran. Further, they announced that a project at Sharif University, funded by […]
China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the highest national legal supervisory body in China (which reports to the National People’s Congress), published a commentary by a learned legal scholar on its official website on the use of Blockchain for Court evidentiary purposes yesterday, noting that for it to grow as a source of reliable evidence in Chinese […]
Canada once again a “Major Money Laundering” country The 2019 “International Narcotics Control Strategy Report” (INCSR) published on Friday by the U.S. Department of State identifies Canada once again as a “major money laundering country” along with a host of risky countries for financial crime. A “major money laundering country” is one whose banks and financial […]
Updated December 26, 2019 – On November 1, 2019, the High Court of Hong Kong reversed its decision and agreed to order a mareva injunction sought by Nico Constantijn Samara against CitiBank and Gatecoin digital currency exchange. This is one of those stories that could only happen in the Bitcoin world. In June 2017, a […]