Australian authorities billed four people following an 18 -month investigation into an Australian cryptocurrency laundering operation of $ 190 million ($ 123 million) which would have a cash safety company.
Australian federal police said they had frozen $ 13.6 million in alleged criminal assets in the States of Queensland and New South Wales.
The Queensland’s joint crime working group (QjoCT), including 70 agencies from federal and state agencies, began the investigation in December 2023. It would have discovered an operation that used an armored vehicle unit of a security company as a front to launder the criminal product in cryptocurrency.
Transaction traces of a suspect, which would have launched $ 9.5 million over 15 months, led investigators to discover a masked complex laundering program as a legitimate commercial activity.
The security company is accused of having mixed its own commercial profits with illicit species deposited by alleged criminals, then by channeling the funds through a sales promotion company, a conventional automotive dealer and cryptocurrency exchanges.
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The Blanchis funds would then have been distributed to beneficiaries either in cryptocurrency or via these companies.
The active crypto and fights money laundering
While blockchain technology offers the potential to modernize financial systems, its open and decentralized nature also makes it attractive for criminals. He can act as a double -edged sword in the fight against financial crime.
According to the channel analysis of the specialist in blockchain’s criminalic specialist, more than $ 100 billion in cryptocurrencies have gone from illicit portfolios to the conversion services between 2019 and mid-2024.
Cybercriminals have become more and more capable of using mixers, DEFI protocols and cross -bridges to obscure their transactions and escape detection. Despite these efforts, blockchain’s transparency remains a powerful tool for the application of the law to trace illicit flows.
Crypto is digital money, but has real implications
In recent months, growing crime cases linked to crypto has occurred in the physical world. Criminals are increasingly turning to violence and intimidation to obtain or protect digital assets.
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Moroccan police recently arrested Badiss Mohamed, Mohamed Amide Bajjou, suspected of having orchestrated a series of kidnappings related to the crypto, including a failed attempt to remove the girl and grandson of the CEO of Paymium, Pierre Noizat, in Paris.
In another high-level case, the co-founder of Ledger, David Balland, was removed from his home in the center of France in January and held hostage for more than a day before the police saved him.
After an increase in physical threats, the so -called “Bitcoin family” – a nomadic Dutch family who liquidated all assets in 2017 to live entirely on Bitcoin – reorganized their personal security by dividing their seed phrase on four continents and by encrypting it with personalized protections.
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