Criminals laundered nearly $90 million through 46 digital currency exchanges, and about $9 million through the ShapeShift exchange, anonymously.
to reportto report, the newspaper’s reporters tracked funds from more than 2,500 crypto wallet addresses linked to criminal activity and found that a total of $88.6 million was laundered through exchanges. By investigating transactions and wallet addresses on Ethereum, the reporter found that $517,000 in ether was transferred on ShapeShift and then converted to Monero. ShapeShift is the largest collection of funds in the United States and is registered in Switzerland, but operates in the US state of Colorado.
The Wall Street Journal reporter showed ShapeShift a list of money laundering suspicions, but Veronica McGregor, the exchanges chief legal officer, said that these addresses have been banned from being used on ShapeShift. The exchange also stated that it will start implementing the know your customer rules next month (KYC, Know your customer policy, strengthened review of account holders, is the institutional basis for anti-money laundering to prevent corruption.), In order to reduce transaction risk.
In the latest response, the exchange’s CEO, Erik Voorhees, commented on the Wall Street Journal article on Twitter, saying it was suggestive and misleading and cited data that contradicted the facts. He said that 2%-5% of the total money laundering in the world is done through banks. Forbes analyst Joseph Young retweeted Erik Voorhees tweet and commented that a Danish bank laundered $230 billion, and digital currency exchanges accounted for only a fraction of it compared to banks.
No matter how large the amount is,Cryptocurrency money laundering has indeed become an important tool for criminals around the world.For example, first convert legal currency into cryptocurrency, and then convert to other countries’ legal currency to complete money laundering.
Like the Russian Alexander Vinnik, he has used Bitcoin to launder money since 2011, with an amount of more than 4 billion US dollars (about 26.8 billion yuan). Vinnik andMentougou Incidentrelated. The hacker sent the coins stolen from Mentougou to Vinniks wallet. Accounts that receive Hacker Coins will be monitored and cannot be cashed out. Therefore, Vinnik opened an exchange BTC-e, transferred the stolen cryptocurrency and sold it on the secondary market, and all the funds obtained were transferred to the internal address of the exchange. The reason why he was arrested was because, in order to save trouble, he deposited the coins stolen from Mentougou back to the account of Mentougou, resulting in information leakage.
At present, all countries have strengthened anti-money laundering supervision in the cryptocurrency market.In May, the European Union passed new anti-money laundering (AML) regulations that regulate the use of cryptocurrencies and the anonymous features of consumer banking products such as prepaid cards, requiring customer verification.
The British Ministry of Finance is expected to implement cryptocurrency regulatory policies by the end of 2018, which may include anti-money laundering and prohibition of anonymity.
Japan’s Financial Services Agency has issued strict rectification orders to major cryptocurrency exchanges in Japan since June this year, requiring stronger verification of user identity information.
Cryptocurrency has become a new carrier of money laundering, but it is not the root of crime. Therefore, the gradual improvement of government supervision is required to lead the cryptocurrency market to a beneficial development.
