Crimes Involving cryptocurrency are on the rise not only in Hong Kong, but worldwide.
In the Iranian capital of Tehran, police arrested a man after some citizens reported their cryptocurrencies and their money were stolen from a fake online trading platform. Tehran Cyber Police said in a statement on Sunday that they have a suspect. The victim told police that all his money and cryptocurrency was stolen from his account on the trading platform, and his username and passwords had been changed. Police investigators took action by filing a lawsuit against the platform, said Davood Moazemi Goudarz, Comander of Tehran Cyber Police Unit. Goudarzi said that their forces arrested the suspect in the north of Tehran that was operating this fake online trading platform. Users were manipulated into giving up their personal information which allowed the suspect to withdraw their assets.
The suspect confessed to the police that he would deactivate the accounts of the users after withdrawing all their cryptocurrencies. The police commander said as many as 50 people had lost their assets on the fake website.
In Hong Kong, Cryptocurrency crimes and the scale of losses are soaring to record levels in the first six months of this year, with one victim conned out of HK$124 million (US$15.9 million). Police logged 496 such cases involving victims losing a total of HK$214.4 million in the first half of 2021. Across the whole of last year, total losses from 208 cases stood at HK$114.4 million.
In the US Cryptocurrency crime is rising as well. This week CNIR reported, a small custody platform called Anchorage Digital announced it had won a contract from the Department of Justice to store and liquidate digital assets that federal law enforcement seizes following criminal investigations. The US Marshal Service has essentially hired a bank to store and sell billions of dollars worth of forfeited cryptocurrency, including troves of Bitcoin and Ethereum. The US Marshals Service is the agency in charge of holding and auctioning off many seized digital assets.
