Bitcoin News Thebittimes.Com

An ex-takeaway worker living in the UK has been found guilty of laundering funds for a Chinese fraudster and managing over £2 billion ($2.5 billion ) in Bitcoin that has now been seized by police.   The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced Jian Wen’s conviction at Southwark Court on Wednesday. It noted that the 42-year-old was guilty of one of three money laundering charges.  Wen had reportedly lived a ‘modest lifestyle’ in Leeds before meeting Yadi Zhang, real name Zhimin Qian. Zhang is a Chinese national and a wanted fugitive accused of making $6 billion in Bitcoin through scamming nationals in China.   The two moved to London and bought a six-bedroom manor house in 2017. They reportedly claimed to be international jewelers with Wen acting as a ‘front person.’ Zhang gave Wen 3,000 bitcoins, worth £15 million at the time and Wen helped convert it into various luxury items, cash, and property to disguise the true source of the funds. ...

The collapse of Silvergate, Signature, and Silicon Valley Banks left the crypto industry reeling with countless Twitter Spaces framing the event as a deliberate “Operation Chokepoint 2.0.” For Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, it turned out to be a particularly tight situation, despite CEO Changpeng Zhao’s (CZ) cryptic assurance that “Binance do [sic] not have asset losses at Silvergate.” Binance has spent much of its lifespan as a sort of pirate radio operation, never touching dry land — or at least a scrupulous jurisdiction. This, understandably, has taken something of a toll on its ability to exchange between fiat and crypto. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) case against Binance examined the corporate entities that CZ had used to manage its money in those now-failed banks, particularly Key Vision, Merit Peak, and Sigma Vision . Indeed, the SEC’s case clearly depended on revelations of those chains of ownership that only the banks’ failures would re...