On Jan. 7, Anatoly Legkodymov, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Bitzlato, was arrested in Miami. The following day, the U.S. DOJ unsealed a complaint in federal court charging him with “conducting a money transmitting business that transported and transmitted illicit funds.” According to the DOJ, Bitzlato failed to meet U.S….
Throughout a tumultuous 2022, the digital currency and blockchain space saw a number of significant investigation, litigation, and enforcement matters as regulators continue their laser focus on the industry. Our 2022 Year in Review, authored by members of Goodwin’s leading Digital Currency and Blockchain team, recaps the most significant litigation…
In a recent BlockTribune article, Goodwin’s Grant Fondo, David Gardy Ermann, Yoona Lee, Frank DelPesce, and Ahmed Abdelhamid discuss the recent “NFT Indictment” by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the FBI in addition to providing practical advice for trading digital assets. Read…
***This article was originally published in CoinDesk and can be found here – https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/11/24/bitmex-founders-charges-highlight-risks-for-defi In October, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed enforcement actions against the entities and individuals that own and operate the Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange (BitMEX), a trading platform for cryptocurrency…
On Monday, November 16, 2020, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton announced his intention to depart from the agency by the end of 2020. News of Clayton’s decision comes as no real surprise, as it is typical for the SEC Chair to hand the reigns to a successor around the time of…
On October 8, 2020, the Attorney General’s Cyber Digital Task Force announced the release of a publication entitled Cryptocurrency: An Enforcement Framework (the “Enforcement Framework”). The Enforcement Framework describes the DOJ’s three areas of focus for illicit activity involving cryptocurrency: (1) financial transactions associated with the commission of crimes; (2)…
On February 27, 2019, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) announced the indictment of Randall Crater, founder and principal operator of My Big Coin Pay Inc. (“My Big Coin”) by a federal grand jury sitting for the District of Massachusetts for his alleged participation in a scheme to defraud investors by…
Earlier today, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein announced that the President issued an executive order establishing a new Task Force on Market Integrity and Consumer Fraud, comprised of a number of divisions of the Department of Justice (DOJ), including the FBI and various United States Attorney’s Offices as designated…
In the fall of 2017, the United States Department of Justice (“DOJ”) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) each filed actions against Maksim Zaslavskiy for securities fraud in connection with two token offerings, through which he promised token purchasers profits from his companies’ investments in real estate and diamonds. …
On July 26, 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that a grand jury in the Northern District of California had indicted Alexander Vinnik, a Russian national, and BTC-e, the bitcoin exchange that Vinnik allegedly operated, and one of the world’s largest and most widely used digital currency exchanges. The…