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The
Department of Justice (DOJ) is targeting crypto companies that
engage in crimes themselves or allow crimes like money
laundering to happen, Eun Young Choi, director of the agency's
National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET), told the FT.
“... they're allowing for all the other criminal actors to
easily profit from their crimes and cash out in ways that are
obviously problematic to us,” she said.
"And so we hope that by focusing on those types of platforms,
we’re going to have a multiplier effect."
The DOJ in March charged Vietnamese national Minh Quoc Nguyen
with money laundering and identity theft in connection with
crypto platform ChipMixer's operations, claiming that Nguyen
openly flouted financial regulations.
With the novel crackdown on crypto firms, the DOJ aims to ramp
up this scrutiny, sending a "deterrent message" to businesses
that have been able to avoid anti-money laundering or client
identification rules, and who were not investing in solid
compliance and risk mitigation procedures, Choi said.
The NCET director, without naming any specific entity, said that
a company's size "is not something that the department will
countenance" while weighing potential charges.
The Justice Department will also focus on crimes related to
decentralised finance, particularly "chain bridges", where users
can exchange different types of digital tokens, or nascent
projects with codes that are vulnerable to such attacks, she
added.
(Reporting by Rahat Sandhu in Bengaluru; Editing by Varun H K)
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