Earlier this week, a U.S. district court in California sentenced a bitcoin dealer to two years in prison and ordered him to forfeit $823,357 in illicit profits from an unregistered cryptocurrency exchange. Jacob Burrell Campos, a U.S. citizen, pleaded guilty last October, admitting that he operated a bitcoin exchange without registering with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the Treasury Department and without implementing the required anti-money laundering safeguards. Meanwhile, on April 10, Texas regulators issued an emergency cease and desist order against a cryptocurrency and foreign currency trading platform. According to the regulators' order, FxBitGlobe, which markets itself as an investment company, published forged government documents, used a fake address and falsely claimed to be a registered broker-dealer.

On Wednesday, Singapore authorities charged two men for promoting cryptocurrency fraud scheme OneCoin. The two men reportedly engaged in, among other things, incorporating a subsidiary to promote OneCoin and signing up new members and taking in investments in exchange for educational courses and OneCoin tokens. Various governments worldwide, including the United States, have issued warnings against OneCoin. In South Korea, officials recently used artificial intelligence to arrest suspects behind a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme. The scheme reportedly stole 21.2 billion won ($18.3 million) over six months in 2018, but it came to an end when the Seoul Special Judicial Police Bureau for Public Safety trained robots to nab participants in the scheme by using keywords and other clues. And in Japan, a local news outlet reported that G20 member countries will meet on June 8 and 9 in Fukuoka, Japan, to discuss international anti-money laundering regulation with a focus on creating a framework to combat cross-border, international crypto-enabled money laundering and terrorism financing.

A British bank recently issued a study detailing Iranian virtual currency activity and risks posed by Iran to financial institutions. The study noted that, given the current geopolitical environment and the ongoing sanctions against the Iranian government, there has been a movement by both citizens and the state toward use of virtual currency. Finally, a report by a blockchain analytics firm provided details on a recent alleged hack of CoinBene, a large cryptocurrency exchange. According to the report, hackers redirected $105 million in cryptocurrencies from CoinBene to three different addresses using a pattern that indicates an attempt to obfuscate the source of funds and the identity of the alleged hackers.

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