The United States is girding its loins for an election that has cast a pall over a far longer timeframe than we ever should have let it. But then again, what did you expect when so many people spent so much of the past year cut off from their normal lives and circles, growing increasingly dependent on social media as a way of connecting with the outside world? That's not a recipe for sanity, even if it was a race between sane people. The phenomenon of modern information flow has gotten an enormous amount of attention since the last, similarly …
A major financial watchdog in Russia is developing a new cryptocurrency analytics tool to trace major cryptos like Bitcoin (BTC) and privacy coins. Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service, a federal service combating money laundering and terrorist financing, is reportedly planning to build a new analytics platform for tracking cryptocurrency transactions via artificial intelligence. Dubbed “Transparent Blockchain,” the new system is designed to track the movement of digital financial assets and identify crypto service providers to fight illicit activity related to digital assets, local news agency RBC reported on Aug. 10. According to the report, the new system is able to …
A United States financial regulator is looking to gain feedback from the banking industry about how decentralized finance (DeFi) may affect the bureau's efforts to stop financial crime. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) said it is “looking carefully” at DeFi, while the agency’s acting director, Himamauli Das, said the digital asset ecosystem and virtual currencies are a “key priority area” for the agency. Das gave prepared remarks on Dec. 6 at the American Bankers Association’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Conference. The acting director added the agency is “taking a close look” at its Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Combating the Financing …
Brazilian lawmakers are working to provide stricter regulations for cryptocurrency-related crimes, approving a set of new penalties for laundering money with crypto. Brazil’s Special Committee of the Chamber of Deputies has approved a bill that significantly tightens penalties for financial crimes that employ cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC), according to an official announcement on Wednesday. The latest regulatory amendments are part of bill 2303/15, increasing the size of the fines from one-third of the amount of laundered money to two-thirds. The bill also proposes to raise minimum prison terms from three to four years, and increase maximum prison time from 10 …
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) released a report on international law enforcement related to digital assets on Tuesday. It is the first of the approximately one dozen reports mandated in President Joe Biden’s March 9 executive order “Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets.” The report, titled “How To Strengthen International Law Enforcement Cooperation For Detecting, Investigating, And Prosecuting Criminal Activity Related To Digital Assets,” was written with the collaboration of the Departments of State, Treasury and Homeland Security, as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Countries have varying degrees of …