May 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. cryptocurrency enforcement
tsar has said that the country was stepping up scrutiny of
crypto exchanges to target illicit behavior on the platforms,
the Financial Times reported on Monday.
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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