- The FBI joins hands with the Ukrainian government and takes down criminal driven crypto exchanges.
- The FBI seized the websites of nine exchanges involved in fraudulent activity.
- There has been more frequent interference from the FBI in the crypto space as of late.
- The seized crypto exchanges did most of their advertisements on shady cyber forums.
The FBI has seized nine exchanges with claims that they allowed cyber criminals to get past all the anti-money laundering measures put in place.
The nine digital currency exchanges allegedly aided and abetted cyber criminals with domains seized by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation and Ukrainian law enforcement.
According to a press release made on May 1st, the FBI’s Detroit field office and the National Police of Ukraine conducted their due research with a court-authorized activity that eventually resulted in the shutdown and seizure of the domains of these crypto exchanges that were suspected of enabling criminal activities on their website.
The domains seized include the websites 24xbtc.com and 100btc.pro, pridechange.com, trust-exchange.org, and bitcoin24.exchange, all of which allegedly offered entirely anonymous digital exchange services to users, which skirted the many rules and regulations guiding licensed crypto firms.
The FBI also added that anyone accessing the seized websites would receive a seizure notification from the authorities.
The FBI also noted that the exchanges involved in offering these services in both English and Russian featured “Lax” Anti-money laundering measures and collected substantial Know Your Customer Information. The Federal Bureau of Investigation claimed that these unlicensed and criminally driven exchanges are essential in cybercrime.
According to the FBI, many of these virtual crypto exchanges made most of their advertisements on online forums created for discussing criminal activities.
Many criminal activities at the now-seized exchanges featured cyber hackers responsible for ransomware and coordinated cyber criminals and scammers.
Recently, the FBI has been involved in several crypto-related investigations. In April, The FBI searched a former FTX executive, Ryan Salame’s home about his former role as one of SBF’s top advisors.
The FBI also seized 86.5 worth of Ether in February and two non-fungible tokens worth more than $100,000 from an alleged phishing scanner.
The FBI intervention and seizure of these things resulted from a lengthy investigation by independent blockchain sleuth ZachXBT, who made the first move into exposing the suspicious activity on Twitter around September 2022.
Conclusion
The FBI interventions in these cases could help in fishing out more criminally driven crypto exchanges and also go a long way in protecting innocent users in the crypto space from getting caught in these shady websites or getting scammed by hackers using the websites as tools.
The FBI’s intervention and interest in these cases could also reduce the likelihood of these internet criminals operating without fear on these websites, seeing as there are more things in place to catch them in the act.
