In October, major exchanges flowed in suspicious assets of 1.464 billion U.S. dollars, countries intensified anti-money laundering supervision
According to the observations of the CoinHolmes anti-money laundering situational awareness platform, the digital asset visual tracking platform, the major digital asset exchanges are currently facing greater anti-money laundering pressure. There is not only terrorism-related address pollution, but also includes fund address, dark web address, Many high-risk addresses such as gambling addresses interact with exchanges. In the past October, major exchanges have inflowed a total of 102,400 “suspicious assets” in BTC, for a total of 1,464 million US dollars.
Anti-money laundering related policies and regulations
1) The Department of Financial Services of the Cayman Islands announced on October 31 that it will determine how the Cayman Islands will supervise and implement anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CFT) measures.
2) The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) commissioner stated in an interview that the latest allegations made by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) against BitMEX have triggered the crypto industry’s understanding of U.S. anti-money laundering (AML) Your customer’s (KYC) regulatory concerns have conveyed to the encryption industry the message that “U.S. laws need to be enforced when products and services involve U.S. users.”
3) The Blockchain Industry Application Anti-Money Laundering Standards Seminar conducted in-depth discussions and exchanges on the content of the “General Requirements for Blockchain Industry Application Anti-Money Laundering”. At the same time, the companies that participated in the drafting of the content carried out relevant reports on site, and finally reached a joint establishment The consensus of the “Blockchain Industry Application Anti-Money Laundering Technology Alliance”.
4) Indian officials have not given a clear definition of crypto transactions. In order to promote a clear official attitude, members of the Indian crypto community proposed to include crypto assets in the regulatory sandbox. The sandbox allows tracking of encrypted transactions and contains general features such as anti-money laundering and KYC.
5) The Financial Information Analysis Institute (FIU) of the Financial Commission of Korea announced that it will release a legislative notice for the implementation of the “Specific Financial Information Act” legislative amendments from November 3. According to the implementation regulations, virtual asset service providers will prohibit the trading of anonymous coins and the processing of virtual assets with money laundering risks. Virtual asset providers will not be able to process transactions related to prepaid cards, mobile gift certificates and electronic bonds.
6) The Isle of Man Financial Services Authority (FSA) issued regulations on blockchain and cryptocurrency supervision. The FSA stated that the specific regulatory treatment will depend on the nature of the tokens, and the regulator will consider “substance rather than form.” The regulations state that although cryptocurrencies such as BTC and ETH are not regulated by the FSA, companies that own such assets must register with the FSA as designated enterprises and comply with anti-money laundering and terrorist financing requirements.
7) The second-review draft of the Criminal Law Amendment (11) was submitted to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress for deliberation on the 13th. The draft clearly stipulates “self-laundering” after serious crimes and related doping violations. The second draft of the draft supplemented and improved the crime of manipulating the securities and futures markets, and further tightened the criminal law network. Amend the crime of money laundering, clarify “self-laundering” after some serious crimes as a crime, at the same time improve the methods of money laundering, and increase the amount of money laundering by underground banks through “payment” settlement methods. The draft also adds provisions to increase penalties for the crime of fund-raising fraud.
8) The Wall Street Journal published a column stating that central banks are pouring into digital currencies without considering that risks may exceed returns. The article pointed out that a survey conducted by the Bank for International Settlements earlier this year found that one in five central banks may issue some form of digital currency in the next six years. But this craze may cause some serious problems. Due to the security and anonymity of digital currencies, the attractiveness of depositing money in banks through deposits will decrease. This will reduce banks’ most stable sources of funding and make them more vulnerable. At the same time, the only real benefits of digital currencies are security and privacy, but even so, this is not conducive to the interests of countries, because it will weaken their efforts to combat money laundering.
9) According to the EU’s fifth anti-money laundering directive (AMLD5), the Dutch Central Bank has authorized the digital asset company AMDAX BV to operate under its jurisdiction. This marks the first encryption service approved by the Dutch central bank. Previously, the Netherlands introduced strict regulations, which caused many encryption companies to close or leave the Netherlands.
10) A report released by the blockchain research company CipherTrace shows that 56% of centralized virtual asset exchanges lack strong KYC measures, and 81% of decentralized exchanges have almost no user verification. CipherTrace said this will be financial Crime and international sanctions open a door. CipherTrace highlighted Uniswap, which has a huge transaction volume in the past few months. Juan Llanos of the consulting firm Juan Llanos Advisors said that the law stipulates that transactions cannot be anonymous, but DEX is considered to be unregulated, so they are a loophole, which means a potential means of money laundering.
CoinHolmes interpretation: All countries in the world intend to strengthen the supervision of the cryptocurrency market. The most direct cause is the rampant activities of drug trafficking, corruption, money laundering and terrorist financing through cryptocurrency in recent years. Therefore, countries urgently need to strengthen the cryptocurrency market. Supervision. However, at present, the judicial department is still facing greater technical difficulties in the supervision of the encrypted market, and there is an urgent need for a professional cybercrime tracking chain data analysis system to assist in the investigation and hunting of criminals.
Encrypted asset related cases
1) The US Department of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday announced the indictment filed in the Eastern District Court of Virginia on September 24. The defendants are 45-year-old Xizhi Li, 40-year-old Jianxing Chen, 46-year-old Jiayu Chen, 43 Eric Yong Woo, 47, Jingyuan Li, 47, and Tao Liu, 45. The U.S. Department of Justice stated that the six people are members of an organization that used casinos to launder money for Mexican drug cartels, amounting to “several millions of dollars.”
2) A couple in Hilversum, the Netherlands, was sentenced to money laundering for using Bitcoin on dark web services and sentenced to two and two and a half years in prison respectively. In addition, the Rotterdam District Court also confiscated 2,532 bitcoins (29 million US dollars) and 250,000 euros (295,000 US dollars) from the couple.
3) On October 15, Europol announced operations in 16 countries/regions and arrested 20 members of the QQAAZZ criminal network. It is reported that since 2016, the organization has been accused of laundering tens of millions of euros for top cybercriminals. These funds were transferred through international bank accounts, shell companies in Poland and Bulgaria, and cryptocurrency hybrid services.
4) A 40-year-old man from Auckland, New Zealand faces a series of charges for money laundering through alleged improper cryptocurrency transactions and the purchase of luxury cars. According to NZHerald, the man appeared in the Auckland District Court on Thursday and faces a total of 30 charges. He was accused of receiving thousands of New Zealand dollars to buy cryptocurrency as part of a money laundering transaction.
5) A source from the Spanish National Police said that Santiago Fuentes, CEO of Arbistar 2.0, was finally captured and detained by the police in the Tenerife region of southern Spain on October 22. Fuentes is accused of defrauding nearly 32,000 investors in a Bitcoin Ponzi scheme worth nearly 850 million euros (about 1 billion US dollars).
6) In a cross-border online gambling case detected by the Huizhou police, the police handling the case discovered a new form of running points mode. The police handling the case said that this case was the first case in the country that used USDT (Chinese name TEDA Coin) to operate a running sub-platform. The police handling the case stated that they should be vigilant and attach importance to the new platform for running points using the USDT digital currency channel. In essence, all scoring models are carefully researched by illegal gambling websites to evade crackdowns and facilitate payment and money laundering channels.
7) The Guangzhou Public Security official issued a statement that on October 3, citizen Ms. Pan went to the Yunpu Police Station to report the case, saying that she met a “netizen” in September, and was then induced to download a fake APP in the name of investing in digital currency. A total of 2.32 million yuan has been invested successively, and it is no longer available for withdrawal. Huangpu Public Security urgently reminded that they should treat the digital currency rationally, and report to the police as soon as there is any doubt or if they have been cheated.
8) Recently, Lin, a resident of Furong District, Changsha, reported to the police that more than 3.2 million yuan was defrauded of investing in digital currency. It is reported that Lin downloaded an app named “AOC” through a URL link sent by a “teacher” in a WeChat group and registered an account. Lin had transferred 25 times to 13 different bank accounts, totaling more than 3,273,900 yuan. A few days later, the digital currency he purchased plummeted by 80%. When Lin called the police, the app could no longer log in, and the “teacher” WeChat account was blocked and lost contact. The case is currently under investigation.
9) The Xuzhou Public Security Bureau recently successfully detected a “CDBC digital currency” large ethnic asset thawing fraud case, arrested 16 suspects, seized more than 60 computers, mobile phones, and bank cards, frozen more than 1.5 million yuan of funds involved, and shot out of the province. The record of internal investigation and handling of such cases with the largest number of arrests at one time. It is reported that this group claimed that the “CDBC digital currency” was the first batch of digital currencies issued by the central bank, 100 yuan per order, each person limited to 7 orders, in the future will be 100 times, 1000 times; at present, all 16 suspects have been transferred to prosecution The agency prosecuted.
10) A few days ago, the police in Huanghua, Hebei successfully destroyed an inter-provincial telecommunications fraud criminal group and arrested 3 criminal suspects, involving more than 1.2 million yuan. It is reported that the criminal group used an investment app to use virtual currency to buy and sell electronic pets to commit fraud.
11) The Pudong police successfully destroyed a virtual currency investment fraud den and arrested 22 criminal suspects. The case involved 7.9 million yuan. It is reported that the “HASTE” virtual currency trading platform involved was developed and maintained by technical personnel of a technology company founded by the criminal suspect Wu, and the use rights were sold to overseas personnel. The platform can directly change the virtual currency quota of users on the platform at will, and simulate and control the currency exchange rate trend through the “robot” of the manipulator.
CoinHolmes interpretation: It can be intuitively felt that in recent years, police in various countries around the world have dealt with more and more cases of various types of cryptocurrency, but at present many cases are still traditional financial, telecommunication fraud and other cases radiating to the field of encrypted assets. This means that once the field of encrypted assets becomes the focus of investigation and elimination, similar cases will become more frequent.
AML anti-money laundering situation data overview
Through on-chain data monitoring, we found that there are frequent interactions between various high-risk addresses such as capital disk addresses, dark web addresses, and gambling addresses, and exchange addresses. The CoinHolmes team defines the inflow and outflow of such high-risk address assets as “suspicious assets” inflow and outflow.
In October, PeckShield has counted the inflows of “suspicious assets” in the major exchanges in the address label of 102,400 BTC, totaling 1.464 billion U.S. dollars, among which the top ten are Binance, Huobi, Coinbase, HitBTC, ZB, Luno, BitMEX, Kraken, Bittrex, Bitget.
In October, PeckShield has counted the total outflows of “suspicious assets” of 49,900 BTC from the major exchanges in the address label, totaling 713 million U.S. dollars. Among them, the top ten are Binance, Huobi, ZB, Bitget, Bithumb, Bitfinex, Gemini, BitMEX, OKEx, Kraken.
