A United States court has sentenced Jacob Burrell Campos to two years imprisonment for operating a Bitcoin exchange business that sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin without registering with the relevant financial authorities as a money transmitter.
The Exchange also failed to implement proper know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) measures, reports TNW April 9, 2019.
Jacob Burrell Campos Jailed
Per sources close to the matter, the long arm of the law has caught up with Jacob Burrell Campos, a 22-year-old United States citizen and Mexico resident for selling hundreds of thousands of dollars in bitcoin (BTC) without registering his business with the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
Reportedly, Burrel, who has been in police custody since August of last year, pleaded guilty to all the charges leveled against him earlier in October 2018, including failure to put in place any form of KYC or AML measures.
Burrell also admitted that he and his associates brought in large sums of cash into the U.S. on a daily basis between 2016 to 2018 without reporting to the relevant financial authorities.
Commenting on the matter, David Shaw, special agent for Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego, declared that Burrell’s punishment will serve as a lesson to other bad actors interested in committing crypto-related crimes.
In his words:
“Today’s sentencing of Burrell is a reminder to those illegal and unlicensed money transmitters that the laws and guidelines of the state applies to cryptocurrency transactions just as they do to other financial dealings.”
How it Worked
The illegal businessman revealed to the prosecutors that he purchased his first supply of the flagship cryptocurrency in the U.S. via an unnamed regulated cryptocurrency trading platform. However, his account got closed shortly after, due to the suspiciously large trading volume.
Instead of calling it quits, Burrel opened a new cryptocurrency trading account with a Hong Kong-based exchange, where he bought a total of $3.29 million in bitcoin through multiple transactions from March 2015 to April 2017.
In addition to the two-year jail term, Burrell will also forfeit $823,357 in illicit profits.
It’s worth noting that law enforcement from across the globe have been doing their best to sanitize the cryptospace and rid it of criminals.
In November 2018, BTCManager informed that the U.S prosecutors had sentenced Joseph Kim, a 24-year-old Arizona man to 15 months imprisonment for defrauding his former employers of more than $1 million in bitcoin.
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