from Hacker News

Operators of Coin.mx arrested by the FBI

by fru2013 on 7/22/15, 3:59 AM with 59 comments

• by pash on 7/22/15, 6:39 AM

  Interestingly, these charges are published on the same day that the first decentralized Bitcoin exchange opens its public beta [0]. And, yes, the whole point of a decentralized Bitcoin exchange is to circumvent the laws that the FBI accuses Coin.mx of breaking:

  Coinffeine takes advantage of the P2P model to avoid accepting deposits in bitcoins or fiat money, making it unnecessary to identify users or fulfill costly money laundering laws in each country. ... “Not having to identify users or enforce KYC laws has allowed us to design a much more scalable exchange model. [...]”, said Alberto Gómez Toribio, CEO of the company.

  For good and for ill, one of Bitcoin's core value propositions will always be its promise to vitiate governments' attempts to control their citizens' money. It's hard to tell who's winning so far, and harder to tell who's likely to win in the end.

  0. http://blog.coinffeine.com/2015/07/21/coinffeine-launches-wo...

• by greenyoda on 7/22/15, 4:28 AM

  From the press release:

  MURGIO and his co-conspirators have also knowingly exchanged cash for Bitcoins for victims of “ransomware” attacks, that is, cyberattacks in which criminals (here, distributors of the ransomware known as “Cryptowall”) electronically block access to a victim’s computer system until a sum of “ransom” money, typically in Bitcoins, is paid to them. In doing so, MURGIO, and his co-conspirators knowingly enabled the criminals responsible for those attacks to receive the proceeds of their crimes, yet, in violation of federal anti-money laundering laws, MURGIO never filed any suspicious activity reports regarding any of the transactions.

• by ChuckMcM on 7/22/15, 5:42 AM

  I think they buried the lede there, it should have been FBI finds bitcoin exchange that still knows where all of the bitcoin it exchanged went :-)

• by kriro on 7/22/15, 5:42 AM

  I have a question about a sentence from that announcement: """[...]and every fact described should be treated as an allegation.""" (towards the very end)

  Is this standard phrasing? As a non-native speaker this sentence seems odd. I'd have guessed that fact and allegation are xor. The sentence implies that there can be facts that are also allegations (or treated as allegations).

• by obstinate on 7/22/15, 4:54 AM

  One of the rules I live by: if I have to lie to a bank in order to accomplish a thing, I do not do that thing.