Key takeaways:
- The Fuzhou Mawei People’s Procuratorate has found a man guilty of buying Tether USD for a friend for 94,988 ($13,067) Chinese Yuan.
- Mr. Chen was subsequently given a nine-month prison term deferred for a year and a fine of 5,000 Chinese Yuan.
The Fuzhou Mawei People’s Procuratorate found a man known as Mr. Chen guilty of the “offense of concealment and concealment of crime” for buying Tether USD for a friend for 94,988 ($13,067) Chinese Yuan.
In February 2022, Mr. Chen’s friend, Mr. Lin, reportedly asked him to submit his bank card information on the social media platform WeChat, according to a local press report. Later, Mr. Lin sent Mr. Chen seven transfers in fiat Chinese Yuan, which Mr. Chen used to buy USDT.
Following that, Mr. Lin received the stablecoins once more. A total commission of 147.1 Chinese Yuan ($20.26) was earned by Mr. Chen as a result of the process. The Fuzhou Mawei People’s Procuratorate offered a statement on the subject:
“Con artists use virtual currency to transfer and launder stolen money. This kind of online money laundering in the name of purchasing virtual currency, knowing that others use the information network to commit crimes and providing assistance to them has violated the law.”
Mr. Chen was subsequently given a nine-month prison term deferred for a year and a fine of 5,000 Chinese Yuan ($689) by the Fuzhou Mawei People’s Procuratorate.
Chinese authorities have started a stern crackdown on cryptocurrency-related activity in the country since the beginning of the year. The Network Security Bureau’s political commissar, Jinfeng Sun, claimed last week that blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) have been used in several events involving “fraud and data theft.”
The crackdown, however, seems to have a broad scope and is not explicitly targeted at deterring crime. The $1.5 billion Multichain protocol was shut down by Chinese authorities in July after the CEO was taken into custody. Since then, bridged assets belonging to users and enterprise money have been enigmatically converted into privacy and stablecoins and bridged out of the protocol. No justification for this has ever been offered.
