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Sept 12 (Reuters) - A federal judge in New York sentenced the co-founder of the purported cryptocurrency OneCoin to 20 years in prison on Tuesday for what prosecutors called a $4 billion fraud.U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos in Manhattan sentenced Karl Sebastian Greenwood, a dual citizen of Sweden and the United Kingdom, who pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges in December 2022.Ramos also ordered Greenwood to forfeit $300 million.Greenwood has been detained in New York since his 2018 arrest in Thailand and extradition to the United States over...

Aug 23 (Reuters) - The United States on Wednesday indicted Roman Semenov and Roman Storm, two co-founders of the virtual currency mixer Tornado Cash, for their involvement with the banned outfit and related laundering of up to $1 billion in criminal proceeds.Storm, a naturalized U.S. citizen who lives in Washington state, was arrested on Wednesday, while Semenov - a Russian national - is yet to be taken into custody, the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York said in a statement.The criminal charges against both men, which include conspiracy to commit...

NEW YORK, July 21 (Reuters) - An American couple accused of laundering billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency stolen from the 2016 hacking of virtual currency exchange Bitfinex have entered into a plea agreement, court records showed on Friday.Heather Morgan, who used the hip-hop alias "Razzlekhan" to push her music online, and her husband Ilya Lichtenstein were initially arrested in February 2022. They are set to appear for a plea hearing on Aug. 3 before Senior Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington, court records showed.Kollar-Kotelly ordered prosecutors and defense lawyers to...

WASHINGTON, June 9 (Reuters) - The United States has charged two Russian nationals in the hack of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox, one of the world's earliest, biggest and most widely publicized alleged bitcoin heists.The department in a statement said Alexey Bilyuchenko, 43, and Aleksandr Verner, 29, were charged with conspiring to launder approximately 647,000 bitcoins from their hack of Mt. Gox, which collapsed in 2014 after losing what was then worth about half a billion dollars in cryptocurrency.The event was one of the first signs of how vulnerable exchanges...

Brian Armstrong, CEO and Co-Founder of Coinbase, speaks at the 2022 Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., May 2, 2022. REUTERS/David SwansonJune 7 (Reuters) - Coinbase (COIN.O) Chief Executive Brian Armstrong on Wednesday hit back at U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler over the agency's lawsuit against the crypto exchange, calling him an "outlier," while also reassuring customers that their funds were safe.The SEC on Tuesday alleged Coinbase traded at least 13 crypto assets that are securities that should have been registered, including tokens...

NEW YORK, June 6 (Reuters) - The top U.S. securities regulator sued cryptocurrency platform Coinbase on Tuesday, the second lawsuit in two days against a major crypto exchange, in a dramatic escalation of a crackdown on the industry and one that could dramatically transform a market that has largely operated outside regulation.The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday took aim at Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. The SEC accuses Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao of operating a "web of deception".If successful, the lawsuits could transform the crypto...

June 6, 2023 - As the number of litigations involving digital assets continues to rise, courts have increasingly grappled with how the U.S. securities laws apply to novel fact patterns that, in many instances, involve conduct occurring outside the U.S. Step one in this analysis is to determine whether they apply at all.The Supreme Court's landmark decision in Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd. sets forth the test for determining which transactions are sufficiently "domestic" to fall within the scope of the U.S. securities laws. 561 U.S. 247 (2010).The Morrison...