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 […]
(1) Claim Central The Alberta Securities Commission (“ASC“) issued two notices today. The first was a warning about a company called “Claim Central” which purports to be an asset recovery agency claiming to be capable of recovering funds from the numerous binary financial scams that have targeted Canadians in the past. In order to activate […]
He called himself a serial entrepreneur. A Court found him to be a serial scammer. Aziz Com Mirza, a Canadian dropout from Montreal was convicted of fraud in a Dubai criminal court this week, sentenced to six months in jail and fined US$75,000. A few days earlier, he had been sentenced to a term of […]
According to an article from Iran, summarized in CoinDesk, it seems that the Central Bank of Iran may have agreed to a policy of working with digital currency exchanges in Iran to provide the connective banking relationships to facilitate international transactions of the movement of digital currencies and money in and out of Iran. One […]
The founder of a digital currency exchange lied so much to the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC“) during its investigation and to a California Court, and made himself so not credible, that a Court has recommended one of the harshest remedies available – to deprive the defendant of the constitutional right to be heard – […]
A Canadian, possibly Iranian Canadian, pled guilty in New York today to conspiracy and securities fraud in connection with a scheme where fake securities of tech companies, such as Twitter and Uber, were sold to investors who suffered losses of US$18 million. Fred Elm, whose real name is Frederic Elmaleh from Toronto, led an investment […]