Ukraine: Four Arrested for Running Fake Crypto Exchanges

Ukrainian police have arrested a group of four men suspected of running six fake cryptocurrency exchanges, Bleeping Computer reported June 21.

Four men between ages 20 and 26 allegedly launched at least six digital currency exchanges, where they deceived users, subsequently stealing money from them. The alleged culprits lured users by promoting the exchanges with fake positive ratings and online reviews. The police reportedly said that the suspects had "special knowledge and skills in the field of programming" and "have created their own CMS-system for managing the content of exchange sites."

During the raid of the suspects’ homes, the police reportedly seized computers, flash drives, smartphones, and other devices. According to a spokesperson for the Ukrainian National Police, “the list of sites is not complete.” Now authorities are asking users to provide information about whether they were deceived by fraudulent exchanges before.

Yesterday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission received an additional emergency court order to freeze the assets of Dominic Lacroix, owner of PlexCorps. Lacroix and his partner, Sabrina Paradis-Royer, were accused of violating securities law in respect to the PlexCoin initial coin offering (ICO) conducted by PlexCorps in August last year. The ICO reportedly raised $15 million from “thousands of investors.”

Earlier this month, Cointelegraph reported that a Bitcoin trader in Los Angeles, California, was facing prosecution for allegedly running an unregistered multimillion dollar Bitcoin-fiat money transmitting business. Accused Theresa Tetley, 50, reportedly earned at least $300,000 annually from her black market business, which ran between 2014 and 2017 via a listing on localbitcoins.com.