21-Year-Old Trader Prosecuted Over Bitcoin Money Laundering
A 21-year-old bitcoin merchant from California has been prosecuted for professedly committing various checks of illicit money transmission and money laundering.
As per a declaration from the Department of Justice in the Southern District of California, Jacob Burrell Campos was requested to be held without bail at a hearing on Friday in association with the charges.
Based on a court documenting against him entered on Aug. 8 and unlocked throughout the end of the week, the prosecutors charged that, from January 2015 to April 2016, Burrell sold about $750,000 worth of bitcoin to 900 people in the U.S. by means of his bitcoin exchange service.
The document said Burrell had not registered the exchange as an authorized money transmitter and purposefully neglected to execute against anti-money laundering measures. For this reason, he was accused of one count of illicit money transmission and one count of money laundering.
Further, the prosecutors said so as to subsidize his “illegal” bitcoin exchange, Burrell committed a total of 28 checks of global money laundering. From February 2015 to February 2016, Burrell purportedly wired as low as $900,000 in 30 transactions from his accounts in the U.S. to Hong Kong-based crypto exchange Bitfinex to purchase bitcoin.
The exchanges were supposedly directed for them to stay away from ID verification procedures after Burrell’s trading account with U.S.- based crypto exchange Coinbase was shut down, the report said.
The prosecutors said in the declaration:
“Burrell’s activities ‘blew a giant hole’ through the legal framework of U.S. anti-money laundering laws by soliciting and introducing into the U.S. banking system close to $1 million in unregulated cash.”
The respondent is also facing a further charge of organizing global instrument transactions to dodge reporting when he attempted to pirate around $1 million from Mexico into the U.S.
However, if Burrell is convicted on any for the money laundering charges, the U.S. government intends to relinquish “any property, real and personal, involved in such offense, and any property traceable to such property.”
