United States authorities have brought criminal charges against a LocalBitcoins trader in connection with operating an unlicensed money transmission business, a government press release confirmed on May 28. As revealed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California, Las Vegas resident Morgan Rockoons will serve 21 months in federal prison for his activities, which also included a bitcoin (BTC)-based real estate fraud scheme. According to the release, Rockoons made over a thousand trades on the P2P platform until the end of 2017. Having failed to register as a money transmitter with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), …

Major peer-to-peer cryptocurrency exchange LocalBitcoins.com has banned users living in Iran, according to their website as of today, May 24. Screenshot of LocalBitcoin Iranian page as of press time A source had previously told Cointelegraph in an email that the impetus for restricting Iranian transactions is to comply with financial regulations in Finland, where the headquarters of LocalBitcoins.com is located. Moreover, exchanges are purportedly cutting off Iranian users due to sanctions previously imposed on other exchanges by the United States. Major crypto exchanges Coinbase and Binance do not currently support users living in Iran. One of the purported advantages of …

A LocalBitcoins trader who sold Bitcoin (BTC) to more than 1,000 people in the United States will serve two years in federal jail, a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of California confirmed on April 8. Jacob Burrell Campos, a Mexican citizen, amassed more than $820,000 from Bitcoin sales on the P2P platform between 2015 and 2018. Through a combination of cash meetups, ATM transfers and MoneyGram, Burrell served traders on the site without performing anti-money laundering (AML) checks and due diligence on the source of the incoming USD funds, prosecutors said. In custody since …

International peer-to-peer (P2P) crypto exchange LocalBitcoins will soon become supervised by the Financial Supervisory Authority of Finland, as the firm announced on its blog on March 25. Helsinki-based LocalBitcoins wrote that the Finnish Parliament approved new legislation that will provide a legal status for cryptocurrency assets on March 13, 2019. The authority has passed a proposal for a new Act on Virtual Currency Service Providers that is expected to come into force in November 2019. The parliament also voted for an amendment to the Act on Detecting and Preventing Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing that will bring all crypto-related services …

Bitcoin (BTC) trading volumes in Venezuela have reached a new all-time high amidst massive hyperinflation and an ongoing presidential crisis, tech news outlet TrustNodes reports Feb. 6. Bitcoin weekly trading volumes reached above 2,000 BTC (about $6.8 million) on peer-to-peer (p2p) exchange LocalBitcoins during the week ending Feb. 2. Venezuela LocalBitcoins Weekly Trade Volumes in BTC. Source: Coin.Dance The recorded trade volumes on LocalBitcoins are just a fraction of overall estimated Bitcoin trading by Venezuelans. As TrustNodes reports, a large amount of trading is taking place on centralized exchanges located in neighboring countries, such as Colombia and Brazil. In such …

A link to a phishing LocalBitcoins clone website had been placed on the official LocalBitcoins forum, but the attack has since been stopped. A LocalBitcoins community manager warned of the attack on Reddit on Jan. 26. According to the post, an unidentified hacker or hacker group detected a security vulnerability in the LocalBitcoins forum and linked it to a phishing forum. Even before the official communication, a Reddit user warned in a post on the Bitcoin (BTC) subreddit: “When visiting the localbitcoins forum [...] users are prompted to log into their account, as if they have been logged out. This …