A London gang cold-called crypto holders, told them their assets were at risk, and moved the money into a Dubai safety deposit box and a Louis Vuitton receipt trail. Then the Met arrived at their door.
Taiwan's Shilin District Court sentenced Shi Qiren to 22 years for running a crypto exchange that laundered NT$2.3 billion (about $75M USD) through 45 physical storefronts. The FSC registration on the wall was not what the customers thought it was.
A Southwark Crown Court sentencing this week put three men behind bars for a £5 million ($5.4M USD) crypto fraud built on a single lie: that the caller on the other end of the line was the police. The lie worked because the callers had already done the reading.
The SEC says Zan Shaikh sold guaranteed monthly returns from a crypto mining operation to more than 380 investors. According to the complaint, only about thirteen cents of every dollar was ever spent on mining.
Federal prosecutors allege Benjamin Paul Wiener built eight companies to move roughly $20 million from dozens of investors through a loop that looked like returns and worked like a pump. This is what the pipe looked like from the chair of someone who wired in.
On the same day BitMEX told the world it was closing, two plaintiffs told a Manhattan court the exchange had spent years running an internal desk that liquidated customers while the servers froze. The complaint puts the losses at 622.66 Bitcoin. The exchange calls it opportunistic.