Economic Daily: Resolutely cut off the virtual currency money laundering industry chain

Odaily Planet Daily News Economic Daily published an article "Resolutely cut off the virtual currency money laundering industry chain". The article pointed out that recently, the Public Security Bureau of Shayang County, Jingmen City, Hubei Province reported that Jingmen police successfully detected a virtual currency money laundering case based on clues from an online chess and card game, involving 400 billion yuan and more than 50,000 people. Behind the case lies a huge industry chain of virtual currency money laundering—upstream, lawbreakers take advantage of some people’s speculative psychology, use “overnight riches” as a bait, and recruit many people to register anonymous addresses to facilitate money laundering; midstream, through Lure and other methods lead the target into the trap, carry out online chess and card game bean recharge, traditional bank card batch circulation, and precipitation on the fourth-party payment platform; downstream, the gambling-related funds are disguised as virtual currency, and then laundered into legal currency funds, Finally, turn the stolen goods into cash. In recent years, as the relevant state departments have continuously stepped up efforts to crack down on money laundering crimes, traditional money laundering channels have been chased and intercepted. The virtual currency has the characteristics of decentralization, anonymity, global convertibility, and convenient transaction. The money laundering method is more hidden and difficult to track. It opens a new channel for money laundering crimes and becomes the soil for a series of new crimes. Regulatory departments should further improve the regulatory mechanism, strengthen technological empowerment, and realize full-chain tracking and full-time information backup of virtual currency transactions and exchanges through the combination of online monitoring and offline investigations, so as to curb the spread of illegal and criminal activities such as money laundering. The platform party should strengthen the awareness of responsibility, improve the management awareness, organizational guarantee, management and control capabilities, technical investment, etc. of anti-money laundering business, and use big data analysis, cloud computing and other technical monitoring methods to plug loopholes in a timely manner.