Some $88.6 million have been laundered through 46 cryptocurrency exchanges, a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) investigation has established. According to the report published on Friday, $9 million of the fraudulently obtained funds have been channeled through Switzerland-based digital assets trading platform ShapeShift. The months-long investigation tracked 2,500 suspected blackmail schemes, investment frauds, and other criminal enterprises dating back to 2016. According to the findings, nearly $35 million in ill-gotten Bitcoin (BTC) and $16.4 million in Ethereum (ETH) have been converted into untraceable cryptocurrency Monero (XMR). Criminals including North Korean agents, credit card scammers, and Ponzi scheme con artists often resorted to ShapeShift due to its anonymous trading policy. Other exchanges used for money laundering included Binance, Bitfinex, BTC-e, Bittrex, Changelly, Gemini, KuCoin, Bitstamp and HitBTC. The WSJ provided ShapeShift with a list of “suspicious” addresses linked to the exchange, and those were subsequently banned from the platform, chief legal officer Veronica McGregor said. She reiterated the company’s plans to begin requiring user identification data. In early September, ShapeShift announced it would abandon its anonymous trading model and introduce account-based trading, which requires of users to submit “basic” personal information for eligibility. Starting as optional, the new policy becomes mandatory as of October 1. While taking steps to remove user anonymity, ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees said in an interview for the WSJ he did not think “people should have their identity recorded to catch an occasional criminal.” Commenting on Voorhees’s views regarding the anonymity policy, McGregor said that “just because it’s the personal philosophy of the CEO doesn’t mean that’s how the business is going to be run. He’s not pro-money-laundering.” Voorhees reacted to the report by accusing the WSJ of dishonesty. “We are aware of the poorly-researched piece written against us by someone at WSJ. The implications are disingenuous and misleading. [The] author cherry-picked data, excluding facts contrary to the vilification narrative. $9m figure is less than 0.2% of our volume over the time-period. Meanwhile global money laundering through banks is 2-5%. Op-ed forthcoming,” Voorhees tweeted, citing data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Read more: https://cryptovest.com/news/crypto-exchanges-used-to-launder-89m-shapeshifts-anonymity-policy-attracts-criminals-wsj-investigation-finds/
