Turkish authorities are progressing with an investigation into local cryptocurrency exchange Thodex, which abruptly halted trading last week. On Thursday, a Turkish court jailed six suspects pending trial, including siblings of the missing CEO and senior company employees, Reuters reported. As part of the probe, Interpol reportedly issued a red notice for Thodex CEO and founder Faruk Fatih Özer, who had reportedly flown to Albania. “When he is caught with the red notice, we have extradition agreements with a large part of these countries. God willing he will be caught and he will be returned,” interior minister Süleyman Soylu said. …

U.S. authorities have arrested the alleged mastermind behind a multi-million darknet-based BTC mixing service, Bitcoin Fog, after analyzing 10 years of blockchain data. Authorities have issued a chilling warning to other users of illegal blockchain services: Anything you do today may come back to haunt you as “this activity is on this ledger forever” and ever-more sophisticated analytics technology can track down crimes committed years earlier. For approximately a decade, Bitcoin Fog has enabled users to conceal the origin and destination of its users’ crypto assets. However, the Internal Revenue Service is charging Russian-Swedish citizen, Roman Sterlingov, with laundering more …

Several South Korean financial authorities are planning to join forces to combat illegal operations involving cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC). The interagency crackdown comes in response to growing concerns over speculative investments and potentially illegal activities amid the ongoing boom in crypto markets, Koo Yun-cheol, head of the Office for Government Policy Coordination, said Monday. “There is a need to pay special attention to the occurrence of illegal activities using virtual assets,” he stated at a vice ministers’ meeting on crypto, according to local news agency Yonhap. As part of the crackdown, which is slated to continue until June, the Financial …

In the waters off Hong Kong International Authorities on Friday, Hong Kong Customs detected suspicious figures offloading cartons from a fishing boat to a nearby speedboat. While the men successfully fled, the authorities reportedly detained the fishing vessel and found a large batch of apparently smuggled goods: everything from dried shark fins and cosmetics to electronics. Notably, among these goods — worth an estimated $31 million in total — were reportedly a stash of over 300 Nvidia CMP 30HX graphics cards, a new line of GPUs dedicated to cryptocurrency mining, which Nvidia released earlier this year in order to ensure …

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has announced charges against California resident James Roland Jones in the first-ever enforcement action from the commission to target securities fraud on the darknet. According to the March 18 complaint, Jones is accused of accessing a darknet-based insider trading forum in late 2016 to seek material non-public information, or MNPI, on which to trade securities. He was unsuccessful in obtaining any useful MNPI from the forum, but in the spring of 2017, Jones allegedly began selling insider stock tips himself under the false pretext he was privy to MNPI obtained both from the forum …

Lawyers negotiating on behalf of Arthur Hayes, one of four BitMEX executives and co-owners accused of violating the Bank Secrecy Act by United States authorities, have finalized the terms of his proposed voluntary surrender to a Hawaii court on April 6. As a letter submitted to the Southern District Court of New York outlines, the counsel's negotiations with the government on behalf of Hayes began shortly after his indictment was unsealed in October 2020. The proposed bail conditions, which are subject to the court's approval, stipulate that Hayes, who has lived in Singapore since January 2020, would potentially be released …

A U.S. Congress subcommittee is investigating if domestic extremists are turning to cryptocurrency as a source of funds for their activities. On Feb. 25, the Subcommittee on National Security, International Development, and Monetary Policy will hold a hearing titled “Dollars Against Democracy: Domestic Terrorist Financing in the Aftermath of Insurrection.” A committee memorandum ahead of the hearing stated that “as scrutiny by traditional banks and payment platforms increases, extremists are turning to solicitations of cryptocurrencies.” The memorandum lumps cryptocurrencies with other potential avenues for illicit activity financing including crowdfunding, charities, and social media platforms. Two main incidents are used to …

Telecoms provider T-Mobile has become the latest corporate name to come under fire for its alleged negligence and failure to protect customer information, which indirectly enabled a "SIM swap attack" that led to the successful theft of $450,000, or 15 Bitcoin (BTC). A SIM swap attack — also referred to as a port-out scam — has proved to be a popular tactic with criminals in recent years. Such an attack involves the theft of a victim’s cell phone number, which can then be used to hijack the victim's online financial and social media accounts by intercepting automated messages or phone …

United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is concerned about crypto's supposed criminal element. In Feb. 10 remarks to a financial sector innovation roundtable, United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated that the misuse of cryptocurrencies and virtual assets has been a growing problem alongside cyber attacks triggered by the global pandemic. Secretary Yellen said that despite the potential of new technologies like crypto, such assets are still associated with major risks. “I see the promise of these new technologies, but I also see the reality: cryptocurrencies have been used to launder the profits of online drug traffickers; they’ve been a …

An Australian citizen has pleaded guilty to cheating investors out of over $90 million by squandering money they invested in his New York-based cryptocurrency funds. Twenty four-year-old Stefan He Qin entered the plea to a single count of a securities fraud charge in a Manhattan federal court on Thursday, Feb. 4. According to the office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the fraud occurred from 2017 to 2020 as Qin operated the fund titled Virgil Sigma. In a statement, U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said: “Stefan He Qin drained almost all of the assets from …

Polish police have detained a suspect in an armed attack on FlyingAtom, a cryptocurrency and gold exchange in the city of Olsztyn in northeastern Poland. The incident, which occurred around 7 p.m. local time on Jan. 22, resulted in the injuries of two employees — one of whose situation was severe enough to necessitate an induced coma. According to local media reports from Jan. 23, the masked attacker escaped with gold worth 450,000 zloty (roughly $120,000), fleeing the exchange's office on the fourth floor of a skyscraper in the city center. Following the incident, police secured the area and scoured …

49-year-old peer-to-peer crypto trader, Hugo Sergio Mejia, has agreed to plead guilty to charges of money laundering and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. The U.S. Attorney’s Office accuses Mejia of using a suite of limited liability corporations to conceal the true nature of his operations while exchanging cash for Bitcoins over a period spanning more than two years. The complaint accuses Mejia of transferring funds between Bitcoin and U.S. dollars worth at least $13 million for clients from May 2018 and September 2020 using his companies Worldwide Secure Communications, World Secure Data, and The HODL Group. According to the …