This story is wild. The listing of seized belongings is wilder. Within the District of New Hampshire, the police arrested a number of folks that had been exchanging cryptocurrencies with no regard for any regulation or AML and KYC procedures. Apparently, “between Could 25, 2016, and March 15, 2021, the defendants exchanged greater than $10,000,000 in cryptocurrency for patrons all through the US.” That’s based on Darknetlive, which specifies:
“In March 2021, a grand jury returned a 20-count indictment charging Ian Freeman, Colleen Fordham, Renee Spinella, Andrew Spinella, “No person” (previously Richard Paul), and Aria DiMezzo with an assortment of economic crimes associated to the operation of a “digital foreign money change enterprise in violation of federal anti-money laundering legal guidelines and laws, together with these requiring cash transmitting companies to fulfill registration and reporting necessities.”
Each Freeman and DiMezzo had been charged with “working an unlicensed cash transmitting enterprise,” plus counts of wire fraud, cash laundering, and trying to evade taxes. Apparently, they “knowingly processed and profited from transactions carried out by fraudsters and scammers.”
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That’s simply the appetizer of the story. The meat and potatoes is in how they did it, and the dessert is the wild-wild listing of seized belongings.
How Did Freeman And DiMezzo Function?
The indictment provides the required context for this seized belongings story:
“The defendants IAN FREEMAN and ARIA DIMEZZO and others operated their illegal digital foreign money change enterprise by means of two main means. First, they marketed digital foreign money on the market on-line by means of web sites together with LocalBitcoins.com. Second, they operated digital foreign money automated teller machines, or kiosks, situated within the District of New Hampshire.”
To this point, so good. The factor is, the defendants prevented detection by opening “financial institution accounts within the names of non secular entities, together with the Shire Free Church, the Crypto Church of N.H., the Church of the Invisible Hand, and the Reformed Satanic Church.” They mislead “banks in regards to the nature of their enterprise. In some instances, the defendants allegedly tricked banks into believing that their cryptocurrency change enterprise was a non secular group receiving charitable contributions.”
Apparently, they instructed their purchasers to say that they had been giving cash to charity or attempting to buy uncommon cash. Which leads us to the listing of seized belongings. You’re not going to imagine this.
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The Unbelievable Checklist Of Seized Property
To this point, it feels like a medium-sized enterprise. Freeman and DiMezzo used a medium-sized web site like Localbitcoins and operated a number of ATMs. How a lot cash might they be processing? In line with Darknetlive, $10M in whole, proper? Nicely, apparently, in addition to chilly exhausting money, gold bars, and platinum, gold, and silver cash; the seized belongings the federal government received had been:
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6.124429323 BTC seized from Ian Freeman;
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315.44728106 DASH, seized from Ian Freeman;
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One bodily ‘1 BTC’ Casascius Bitcoin seized from Ian Freeman’s protected;
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One bodily ‘100 BTC’ Casascius Bitcoin “gold plated bearer bar” seized from Ian Freeman’s protected;
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.9999783 BCH from bodily ‘1 BTC’ Casascius Bitcoin seized from Ian Freeman’s protected;
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.99909638 BTC from bodily ‘1 BTC’ Casascius Bitcoin seized from Ian Freeman’s protected;
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99.99993098 BCH from bodily ‘100 BTC’ Casascius Bitcoin seized from Ian Freeman’s protected;
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99.99765508 BTC from bodily ‘100 BTC’ Casascius Bitcoin seized from Ian Freeman’s protected;
In accordance to this site, the Casascious cash are “the bodily type of bitcoin, protected by a tamper-evident hologram and redeemable by the key key hidden below the hologram.” Apparently, there are “61,560+ Casascius Bodily Bitcoin Addresses.” One other key factor about them is that they will turn into seized belongings.
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What can we be taught from this case, although? Nicely, that bitcoin will not be device for criminals. The indictment doesn’t point out how did they catch Freeman and DiMezzo, however let’s assume that it was by good previous police work. Nicely, the blockchain accommodates an immutable registry of all of their actions. Their purchasers needs to be shaking proper now.
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