Reported by: Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York A criminal complaint was unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging Aurelien Michel, a French national residing in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with defrauding purchasers of “Mutant Ape Planet” NFTs, a type of digital asset, of more than $2.9 million […]
Reported by: Chris Prentice The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is seeking details about FTX investors’ due diligence, according to two sources familiar with the inquiry, as fallout from the crypto firm’s collapse spreads. The SEC has so far brought charges against three of FTX’s top executives, accusing them defrauding investors in the crypto trading platform […]
Reported by: Zahra Tayeb US prosecutors in New York have put together an FTX Task Force to nail down and recover billions of dollars of missing funds belonging to the collapsed crypto exchange’s customers. More than 1 million customers could be affected by what the US government has described as an epic fraud at FTX. […]
Reported by: Richard Vanderford “Cryptocurrency is here to stay,” a top Internal Revenue Service law enforcer said, and the tax-collection agency wants to partner with the industry to fight financial crime. The IRS Criminal Investigation division is bringing on hundreds of new agents a year, including many who will be directed to work on digital […]
Reported by: Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced today that COOPER MORGENTHAU, the former chief financial officer of two special purpose acquisition companies (“SPAC-1” and “SPAC-2”), pled guilty to one count of wire fraud in connection […]
Reported by: Hugh Son U.S. banking regulators warned financial institutions on Tuesday that dealing with cryptocurrency exposes them to an array of risks, including scams and fraud. “The events of the past year have been marked by significant volatility and the exposure of vulnerabilities in the crypto-asset sector,” the regulators said in a joint statement from the […]
Reported by: Jax Miller The FBI reported approximately $1 billion in losses in connection with romance scams in 2021. Here are some tell-tale signs that you might be a victim of love. Romance scams are a subset of what’s commonly referred to as “catfishing,” when a person conjures up a fake online persona to lure […]
Reported by: Zack Whittaker, Carly Page Arrested, seized, doxed and detained. These are just some of the ways police and prosecutors around the world took down the biggest cybercrime operations of the year, even if it meant resorting to new and unconventional eyebrow-raising methods. From stashing billions of bitcoin under the floorboards to teenage hackers […]
Reported by: Alix Langone The US Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation into $372 million in stolen FTX assets, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The probe, which is independent of the fraud case against FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, centers on more than $370 million that went missing mere hours after the cryptocurrency […]
Reported by: Alex Zeltcer Anti-money laundering (AML) measures, such as Know Your Customer (KYC), that crypto operators are also required to follow have been a boon for fraudsters who know where the loopholes are in this legislation. The fact is, however, that over 75% of all fraudulent activity comes from KYC-verified accounts. That statistic should […]
Financial Crime News Briefs 