□ Reporter Ding Guofeng
□ Correspondent Zhang Chuanbing Wei Jin of our newspaper
Different from traditional money laundering through multi-level bank card transfers, virtual currency with anonymity and decentralization has become a new medium for criminal gangs to launder money. "Black money" is exchanged into virtual currency through buying and selling, and then sold. "Black money" is laundered into "white money".
Recently, the Jurong City People's Procuratorate of Jiangsu Province prosecuted a case of using virtual currency to cover up and conceal criminal proceeds. Ten defendants including Zhang and Li were sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment ranging from 4 years to 7 months. And a fine ranging from 90,000 yuan to 1,000 yuan.
On December 19, 2020, the Jurong police received a report from a citizen named Teng saying that he had been defrauded online. Later, when the police conducted a fund flow inquiry, they found that the defrauded funds had flowed into the bank account of Xiao (handled in another case).
After investigation, Xiao Mou sold the virtual currency USDT on the Huobi virtual currency trading platform many times.
According to Xiao's confession, he followed the arrangement of his superiors to sell the Huobi transferred to him by his superiors and then withdraw cash.
During the traceability of the Huobi trading account, the police found that the Huobi sold by Xiao was all from the same mixed currency fund pool (that is, it is difficult to find the counterparty for the inflow and outflow of funds, hiding the transaction path and identity information, blocking The relationship between funds) flowed out, the amount of Huobi in the fund pool was as high as more than 12 million yuan, and part of the Huobi was sold from the Huobi account of another group. Waiting for 10 defendants to be arrested and brought to justice.
After investigation, in August 2020, Li saw the news that someone was receiving USDT in a "running points" group, and the commission was high, so he got in touch with the previous company "Raytheon" and started trading on the Huobi platform For the business of virtual currency, Li sends his bank account to "Thor", and "Thor" transfers the money for buying coins to Li's bank account, and Li uses the money to buy coins on the platform. Transfer the Huobi to the designated account by scanning the code or specifying the link, and eventually the Huobi will flow into a general fund pool, with a commission of 70 yuan for every 10,000 yuan purchased.
In order to avoid supervision, the two usually communicate on overseas software.
Because each Huobi account can only buy 20,000 to 30,000 USDT per day, Li found 3 more people to "run points".
In addition, there is another group of 6 people, including Zhang, who bought coins, and a group of 6 people is also doing the same "running score" operation.
The operation of Li and others is actually "money laundering" for the upstream criminal gang. Once the "black money" is transferred to the primary bank account provided by the upstream gang, it is immediately transferred to the secondary account of Li and other front-end gangs. The gang quickly withdraws cash to the third-party platform, and then uses the bound account to buy virtual currency with "black money" on the trading software, then withdraws the currency to the designated account, and another group of back-end personnel sells the virtual currency in the designated account.
The entire money laundering process is fast and difficult to track. In addition, the front-end and back-end personnel are not in contact with each other, making it even more difficult to track the whereabouts of "black money".
According to reports, the police verified 19 victims during the handling of the case, involving more than 2.27 million yuan in defrauded funds. Gang and Zhang gang are two of them. How to clarify the amount of money laundering actually participated by the two gangs has become a problem that must be solved.
After the case was transferred for review and prosecution, the Jurong Procuratorate formed a professional case-handling team to analyze and judge the case detection process, personnel relationship, status and role, and capital flow for many times. Finally, it was found that Li and others participated in money laundering of more than 70,000 yuan. A certain group of people participated in money laundering of more than 870,000 yuan in total, which constituted the crime of covering up and concealing criminal proceeds.
In order to try their best to recover the victims' economic losses, the procurator in charge urged the defendants to take the initiative to return the stolen goods many times. In the end, the above-mentioned defendants returned a total of more than 400,000 yuan in stolen goods and voluntarily pleaded guilty and accepted punishment.
Based on the circumstances of the whole case, the People's Court of Jurong City adopted all the sentencing recommendations of the procuratorate and made the above-mentioned judgment in accordance with the law.