Reported by Sean Lyngaas (CNN)A team of South Korean spies and American private investigators quietly gathered at the South Korean intelligence service in January, just days after North Korea fired three ballistic missiles into the sea. For months, they’d been tracking $100 million stolen from a California cryptocurrency firm named Harmony, waiting for North Korean hackers to […]
Reported by Mathew Di Salvo The U.S. Department of the Treasury has warned of criminals using decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols but admitted that money launderers and terrorists typically prefer fiat currencies over crypto. In its “Illicit Finance Risk Assessment of Decentralized Finance” report released today, the U.S. body said that ransomware crooks, thieves, scammers and other criminals […]
Reported by SHALINI NAGARAJAN Source: Shutterstock / Tada Images, modified by Blockworks The Securities and Exchange Commission appears to be close to a settlement agreement with Ishan Wahi, a former product manager at Coinbase who the agency charged and accused of insider trading. In February, Wahi pled guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud […]
Reported by Stephanie Baker The UK’s National Crime Agency has dropped part of its investigation into sanctioned Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman after dramatically raiding his London home and arresting him late last year. The NCA is no longer probing Fridman on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud the UK Home Office and conspiracy to commit perjury, people familiar with the […]
Reported by Sophie Mann For Dailymail.Com and Associated Press Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio gave bombshell testimony in court for the prosecution in federal court on Monday morning as part of hip-hop star Pras Michel’s money laundering trial with the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) DiCaprio’s involvement in the case stems from the money behind his film ‘The Wolf of […]
Reported by CIARAN LYONS DeFi execs at the World of Web3 (WOW) Summit in Hong Kong argued that implementing “Know Your Customer” (KYC) measures will tackle the “biggest issue” in decentralized finance (DeFi), which is hackers laundering millions of stolen funds into “clean money.” During a panel session at the summit on March 29, titled […]
Reported by Cyrus Farivar Roblox, the wildly popular children’s video game platform, may have a money laundering problem. According to a new court filing, more than 300 Roblox users are purportedly laundering money by using in-game currency to purchase fake in-game goods, according to a proposed settlement filed in San Francisco federal court Tuesday. “They appear to […]
Reported by Leo Schwartz At a Manhattan courthouse on Thursday, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty to five additional charges brought by U.S. prosecutors related to November’s collapse of FTX. The charges included conspiracy to commit money laundering, unlawful political contributions, and bribing a Chinese official, a new allegation filed by prosecutors earlier this […]
Reported by Mengqi Sun The suit by U.S. regulators against Binance Holdings Ltd. focuses in large part on the work of the cryptocurrency exchange’s former chief compliance officer, alleging he willfully aided and abetted the firm in evading U.S. laws. Samuel Lim, Binance’s compliance chief between 2018 and 2022, faces civil charges of undermining Binance’s […]
Reported by Dorota KOLINSKA On Tuesday, MEPs from the Economic and Monetary Affairs and Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs committees adopted their position on three pieces of draft legislation on the financing provisions of EU Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) policy. The package consists of: Read full report: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/pt/press-room/20230327IPR78511/new-eu-measures-against-money-laundering-and-terrorist-financing
Financial Crime News Briefs 