Author Archive: David Rosenfield

The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has sanctioned the virtual currency Tornado Crash after news emerged that the owner may have inadvertently (and allegedly) laundered more than $7 billion worth of virtual currency since 2019. Tornado Crash was also used to launder nearly $100 million of malicious cyber attackers’ funds derived…

The Financial Stability Board (FSB) has announced it will release international cryptocurrency regulations in October. The FSB has announced these upcoming guidelines after the crypto market has faced great turmoil and volatility. Bitcoin has slumped nearly 70% since November of 2021, resulting in an increased demand for a legal, regulatory framework behind crypto. Government regulators…

The DOJ has charged Nathaniel Chastain, a former product manager at Ozone Networks, Inc. d/b/a OpenSea (“OpenSea”), a non-fungible token marketplace, with wire fraud and money laundering, in connection with a scheme to commit insider trading involving NFT’s. The defendant used confidential, OpenSeal information regarding which NFT’s were going to be featured on its homepage.  David…

The US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has sanctioned Blender.io, a virtual currency mixer that is used in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to facilitate North Korea’s cyber activities and to engage in money laundering of stolen virtual currency.  This sanction was initiated after Lazarus Group, a DPRK cyber…

The CIA’s venture capital company, In-Q-tel, has discretely launched a SPAC that aims to fuel significant returns for former CIA officers. This news is deemed important as the SEC has recently been cracking down on SPACs and initiating stricter regulations surrounding them.  This SPAC, titled Chain Bridge 1, is seeking to acquire a defense contractor…

New York State Senator Kevin Thomas has prepared a bill outlining the framework for crypto-related prosecutions. The bill calls for defining, penalizing, and criminalizing fraudulent behavior in connection with cryptocurrencies.  Some of the charges set forth in the bill include failure to disclose the ownership of digital tokens, and if an individual or entity owns…

Yesterday, March 28th, the SEC announced insider trading charges against three software engineers at Twilio, Inc., and their families and friends for allegedly generating over $1 million from company profits.  The engineers involved in this case had exclusive access to various company databases that contained information regarding the company’s revenue. In an internal messaging chat, one…