Japan’s Police Unearths Money Laundering Cases Tied to Its Local Crypto Exchanges
Japan has been one of the most crypto-friendly nations since the very beginning and also is the biggest contributor in terms of the overall crypto trading volumes of the globe. The government of Japan, at every step, has set up conducive rules for its citizens by allowing them to engage in crypto-related activities.
Last year Japan released a set of rules and regulations for the functioning of the crypto exchanges in the country and also granted licenses to companies following the rules. However, much recently, the country was hit from one of the biggest thefts in the crypto history thereby wiping-off an overall $500 million worth digital assets from the user accounts of the ‘Coincheck’ exchange.
Ever since then, the country’s regulatory bodies and other departments have been performing multiple checks to make sure that exchanges have the necessary infrastructure to protect their customer’s funds. In its latest search, the Japan police have recently informed the press that it has unearthed nearly 669 reports that involve “suspected money laundering” done through cryptocurrency transactions done on the domestic digital currency exchanges.
According to the country’s local publication - Nikkei Asia Review the National Police Agency (NPA) of Japan has recently released a report on Thursday showing several such cases which emerge from suspicious crypto transactions taking place between April 2017 to December 2017. The National Police Agency although refrained to comment on why the exchange operators were asked to report the latest findings. However, the Nikkei Asia Review was quoted saying that “Questionable transactions repeated frequently in a short span of time.”
While legalizing the status of Bitcoins in April 2017 last year, the government in its legislation had also reported of suspected transactions as a part of drug trafficking and money laundering in a bid to crackdown on the use of cryptocurrencies for illicit activities.
The National Police Agency also said that after the arrival of AML/KYC laws last year, suspected money-laundering cases involved with digital currencies have dropped to a considerable in comparison with the previous year of 2016. Last year, there were around 400,043 AML/KYC reported investigations which were 1048 cases less than the previous year.
The NPA said that banks and other financial institutions played a very coordinating and cooperative role in helping the authorities find these cases. Credit card companies and other local credit unions reportedly disclosed 28,707 cases to the police department while other financial institutions reported 350,000 cases approximately.