US PROSECUTORS TRY TO SEND WARNING TO CRYPTOCURRENCY WORLD WITH KUCOIN PROSECUTION

A top U.S. prosecutor announced criminal charges Tuesday against a once-ascending company in the cryptocurrency world and two of its founders in a bid to send a message to other players in the industry to follow U.S. laws.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said conspiracy charges against KuCoin and two executives should warn other crypto exchanges that they cannot serve U.S. customers without following U.S. laws. An indictment in Manhattan federal court said the company and its founders tried to conceal the existence of its U.S. customer base.

In December, New York Attorney General Letitia James secured a payout of more than $22 million from KuCoin to refund $16.7 million to over 150,000 New York investors and provide New York state with over $5.3 million. KuCoin was also required to cease New York operations after falsely representing itself as a crypto exchange without registering as a securities and commodities broker-dealer, James said.

Williams said in a release that KuCoin, formed in 2017, “took advantage of its sizeable U.S. customer base to become one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency derivatives and spot exchanges, with billions of dollars of daily trades and trillions of dollars of annual trade volume.”

He said the company deliberately chose to flout U.S. laws designed to help identify and eliminate crime and corrupt financing schemes on financial platforms. As a result, authorities said, the company was used as a vehicle to launder large sums of proceeds from criminal malware, ransomware and fraud schemes.

KuCoin failed to implement even basic antimoney laundering policies as it let customers process over $4 billion of suspicious and criminal funds as KuCoin operated in the shadows of the financial markets and provided a haven for illicit money laundering, Williams said.

Darren McCormack, who heads the New York office of Homeland Security Investigations, said the prosecution exposes one of the largest global cryptocurrency exchanges as a multibillion-dollar criminal conspiracy.