Four men have reportedly been arrested in Japan's Aichi Prefecture for running an allegedly fraudulent crypto investment scheme that persuaded investors they could reap returns on the basis of an artificial intelligence (AI)-led trading system. Roughly 20,000 Japanese investors nationwide are thought to have been drawn into the scheme, which raised an estimated total of 6 billion yen ($55 million). The four suspects: Shoji Ishida, Yukihiro Yamashita, Takuya Hashiyada, and Masamichi Toshima, were arrested on July 12, according to Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. The alleged scam, dubbed the "Oz Project" promised that the automated, AI-based system would result in investors …

Victims of an alleged $3.6 billion crypto Ponzi scheme in South Korea are reportedly hampering the progress of a police investigation and a joint lawsuit — as they still believe in the project and hold out hopes of getting a return on their investments. On June 4, Korean law firm Daegon reportedly filed a joint complaint against V Global, its CEO, and three executives on behalf of 130 investors and the Gyeonggi Nambu Police Agency. The Gyeonggi Nambu Police Agency is reportedly investigating V Global for an alleged crypto Ponzi scheme that reportedly defrauded around 69,000 people out of 4 …

Blockchain’s potential to sustain a distributed, tamper-proof infrastructure for collective digital memory has taken on an unexpected political salience for citizens in Hong Kong. Soon after Hong Kong’s public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong, or RTHK, revealed its intent to erase any archived content older than one year, residents hurried to save a trove of past news footage that had until now been freely available to the public. The reason for their haste was the recognition that RTHK’s archive contains critical coverage of the recent years of anti-authoritarian struggles and protests that were initially sparked by the introduction of the …

Turkish authorities are progressing with an investigation into local cryptocurrency exchange Thodex, which abruptly halted trading last week. On Thursday, a Turkish court jailed six suspects pending trial, including siblings of the missing CEO and senior company employees, Reuters reported. As part of the probe, Interpol reportedly issued a red notice for Thodex CEO and founder Faruk Fatih Özer, who had reportedly flown to Albania. “When he is caught with the red notice, we have extradition agreements with a large part of these countries. God willing he will be caught and he will be returned,” interior minister Süleyman Soylu said. …

Turkish police have detained 62 people as they continue to investigate an alleged exit scam potentially affecting 391,000 crypto exchange users and roughly $2 billion in investments. On Thursday, Cointelegraph reported that major Turkish crypto exchange Thodex had abruptly halted trading and withdrawals amid reports of police raids. On Friday, in addition to the 62 already detained across eight Turkish provinces, police issued detention warrants for a further 16 people, according to the Associated Press. Istanbul’s chief prosecutor’s office yesterday announced it was opening a probe into the case following complaints from Thodex users who had lost access to their …

The Department of Justice is reportedly the latest to turn up the heat on last month's crazed markets. Citing unnamed sources, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the DoJ's fraud division and the San Francisco district attorney's office had launched probes into the brokers (read: Robinhood) and social-media platforms (read: Reddit) who were at the center of wild bull markets on stocks like GameStop and AMC weeks ago. A number of agencies have announced that they are looking into market manipulation concerns. The Securities and Exchange Commission released a cryptic statement to that effect as GME stocks were …

Polish police have detained a suspect in an armed attack on FlyingAtom, a cryptocurrency and gold exchange in the city of Olsztyn in northeastern Poland. The incident, which occurred around 7 p.m. local time on Jan. 22, resulted in the injuries of two employees — one of whose situation was severe enough to necessitate an induced coma. According to local media reports from Jan. 23, the masked attacker escaped with gold worth 450,000 zloty (roughly $120,000), fleeing the exchange's office on the fourth floor of a skyscraper in the city center. Following the incident, police secured the area and scoured …

United States authorities have hit a major malware operator, with help from leading blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. On Wednesday, the Department of Justice announced the seizure of $454,530.19 in cryptocurrency from NetWalker, a ransomware operator the Federal Bureau of Investigation alleges to have targeted hospitals globally amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Piggybacking on the DoJ's announcement was Chainalysis, which took the opportunity to advertise the firm's involvement in tracking down NetWalker hardware in Bulgaria as well as Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins. The DoJ arrested Vachon-Desjardins, a Canadian national who it alleges to be an affiliate of the NetWalker network who garnered $27.6 million …

Italian authorities have found Bitgrail’s founder responsible for fraudulent activity related to the 2018 hack of the platform that resulte in the loss of $150 million. Francesco Firano, the sole director of now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange Bitgrail, is accused of taking over customer funds prior to reporting the theft of crypto from the exchange. According to a Dec. 21 announcement by the Postal and Communications Police — a cybercrime unit of the State Police of Italy — Firano kept the platform intact for months despite having identified a major security breach involving Nano cryptocurrency: “In keeping the platform open, despite having …

Per a Dec. 11 announcement from the Department of Justice, Assistant Attorney General Beth Williams is out of the policy department Since 2017, Williams has been a leader at the Office of Legal Policy. Though the DoJ's announcement today explicitly says Williams is leaving the office rather than the department as a whole, it does not say where she is bound for next. As the announcement notes, Williams has been particularly involved in: "The department’s cyber policies, including coordinating the development of a recent white paper on cryptocurrency as part of the Cyber-Digital Task Force." This is in reference to …

Mexican authorities report an increase in the use of crypto assets to launder funds by criminal syndicates in Latin America. In a Dec. 8 report from Reuters, the head of Mexico’s finance ministry’s financial intelligence unit, Santiago Nieto, described how cartels use crypto to launder money obtained in illicit activities. Neito asserts Latin cartels will typically deposit their ill-gotten gains into various bank accounts as sums of less than $7,500 — the threshold that would prompt banks to flag a transaction. The funds are then used to make a myriad of small quantities of Bitcoin (BTC), which can then be …

In early October, the U.S. Department of Justice revealed its Cryptocurrency Enforcement Framework, a report laying bare the government’s vision for emerging threats and enforcement strategies in the cryptocurrency space. The document is an important source of insight into how the laws governing digital finance will be soon implemented on the ground. One of the fundamental principles that the government asserts in the document is its broad extraterritorial jurisdiction over foreign-based actors who use virtual assets in ways that harm U.S. residents or businesses. The guidance sets an extremely low bar for perpetrators of cross-border crime to clear before they …