Tweet A Russian national, Maksim Boiko, who was accused of operating a money laundering as a service (“MLaaS“) business, pleaded guilty in Pittsburg today, to one count of conspiracy to launder money. In this case, the MLaaS involved opening personal and company bank accounts to receive and then move money for criminals and opening Bitcoin […]
Tweet US$60 million penalty On October 19, 2020, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN“) assessed a US$60 million penalty (here) against Larry Dean Harmon, the owner of two Bitcoin mixing and anonymizing services called Helix and Coin Ninja LLC. FinCEN found that the two entities were operating as unregistered money services businesses (“MSB“) which exchanged […]
Tweet CFTC civil enforcement action The Commodities Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC“) today filed a civil enforcement action in the SDNY against the owners – operators of a digital currency exchange called BitMEX, for alleged violations of the Commodity Exchange Act. BitMEX processed trillions of dollars in transactions, received over US$11 billion in Bitcoin and made […]
Tweet The US Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC“) filed a complaint in Texas on March 16, 2020, against Robert Dunlap, Nicole Bowdler, the girlfriend of Dunlap, and a former Washington State Senator, David Schmidt, in connection with a digital currency they launched called Meta 1 coin (the “MetaCoin“) which raised US$4 million from the […]
Tweet Indictment for mixing service On February 13, 2020, the US government unsealed an indictment against Larry Dean Harmon, the alleged founder of a Bitcoin mixing Bitcoin service, and of a darknet search engine that hooked up with the now-defunct illegal Canadian darknet site called AlphaBay, operated by Alexandre Cazes. The mixing service was called […]
Tweet A UK man, Paul Johnson, was sentenced to eight years in jail in the UK for operating a darknet drug trafficking business from the attic of his home. In order to obfuscate what he was doing, he set up a company called “Labrador Tea Company” and used it to buy illegal drugs from Canadians […]
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 The brother A criminal complaint filed in the Southern District of New York and deposed by a special agent of the FBI against Konstantin Ignatov, an executive who helped operate a digital currency company called OneCoin and a digital currency exchange, sheds some light on the murky world of OneCoin. The money From 2014 […]
Tweet The DOJ from the Southern District of New York, unsealed a grand jury superseding indictment against two people today for allegedly providing payment processing services to digital currency exchanges without being licensed and under circumstances where they allegedly lied to obtain bank accounts. They are charged with bank fraud. According to the indictment, Reginald […]
Tweet Two Bitcoin-related alleged drug traffickers living large 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, but […]