24-Year-Old Sent To Prison For Engaging In Unlicensed Money Transmitting Business
US law agencies can enjoy celebrations on another success of their tireless endeavours to prevent ‘unlicensed money transmitting’ in the land of the free. The cutting-edge victory is sending a 24 year old crime kingpin to federal prison for making $40,000 from buying and selling bitcoin offline.
A 24 year old named Eldon Stone Ross from Kennett Square borough of Chester County, Pennsylvania, has been sentenced on Wednesday to serve a 12 months and a day in federal prison for buying and promoting large amounts of bitcoin to people without reporting the transactions to the United States authorities.
Ross supposedly sold $1.5 million in bitcoin for about 2 years but only made $40,000 (almost 2.6%) in commissions, which he has been seized by the authorities, plus to his year-long prison sentence. He has been convicted for engaging in an unlicensed money transmitting business between January 2015 and November 2016 and failing to report the fiat to bitcoin transactions.
“We don’t see a lot of those cases. It’s the first I’ve done here,” said Bert Glenn, the assistant U.S. lawyer who prosecuted the matter in Philadelphia. “If people can go to someone like Ross who’s dealing outdoor the institutional market, it adds to their anonymity,” he warned.
Ross confessed in October 2017 that he sold $50,000 worth of bitcoin to undercover federal agents related to homeland security Investigations. In each case, they reported that “failed to obtain identifying information from the agents,” as per court records. Like in previous such instances throughout America, the government claimed that by exchange-like know-your-customer (KYC) methods and reporting to the department of the Treasury, the bitcoin supplier was enabling money laundering.
interestingly, the 24-yr old was already in prison for drug offenses according to the Philadelphia Inquirer amid some of the time in which he is supposed to had been operating the illegal money transmitting business. After his new prison term is over, Ross will be another three more years of supervised released.
