An interesting civil complaint was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York on March 10, 2022, which gives a rare window of visibility on the initial coin offering (“ICO“) process. Its a world not too many have knowledge of and which many thought was a thing of the past […]
The biggest money laundering case in Canadian history, only it isn’t taking place in Canada The US Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) filed a proposed amended complaint on February 3, 2022, in the US District Court of Massachusetts in case of SEC v. Frederick Sharp, Avtar Dhillon, Zhiying Chen, Courtney Kelln, Michael Veldhuis, Paul Sexton, Jackson Friesen, […]
The Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC“) filed a civil complaint against 5 American promoters of the Blockchain protocol known as BitConnect this week. Investors from around the world lost over US$2 billion with BitConnect. The SEC alleges that the defendants conducted an unregistered offering and sale of securities in connection with its native coin and […]
According to the Twitter account of a Bitcoin investor, the DeFi platform called DeFi100, that is listed on Binance, posted a notice on its website earlier today that it scammed its investors and that there was nothing the investors could do about it. “Ha ha. All you moon boys have been scammed. Fuck you moon […]
The hunt for Faruk Fatih Ozer’in, or Ozer, a Turkish foreign national, may be over. Ozer ran a large digital currency exchange in Turkey called Thodex. He fled Turkey in April and US$2 billion of money from its customers is apparently missing, or inaccessible. In the CCTV footage below, Ozer is seen arriving at the […]
China is reporting that in 2020, 64% of cybercrime involved financial fraud, including online illegal gambling, online illegal loans and illegal securities sold online on various platforms, such as WeChat and QQ. Many of the fraud cases involved Bitcoin and other digital currencies. In December 2020, the public security agency of China intercepted a transnational […]
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 accounts […]
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 currencies, […]
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 more […]
Two more men involved in a digital currency exchange and a digital currency, were murdered in Mexico. Their bodies were recently found stuffed in suitcases in Sinaloa cartel land, according to this newspaper article. The two, Oscar Brito from Chile and Ignacio Ibarra from Argentina, were involved in selling and promoting the digital currency called […]