Germany shuts down 47 crypto exchanges for money laundering activities

German authorities have shut down 47 cryptocurrency exchanges operating in the country for allegedly facilitating large-scale money laundering operations for cybercriminals.

According to an official statement from Frankfurt’s main prosecutor’s office, the German Internet Crime Office and the Federal Criminal Police Office, these exchanges deliberately allowed their users to bypass Know You Customer (KYC) policies. .

The KYC policy is a verification process that requires users of the platform to submit their basic identification data. However, because these exchanges allowed users to complete transactions without such verification, they created an enabling environment for cybercriminals to launder the proceeds of their illegal activities with little or no risk of prosecution.

Some of the seized exchanges include Xchange.cash, 60cek.org, Banksman.com and Prostocash.com. Police stated that the main users of these exchanges include ransomware groups, darknet merchants and botnet operators.

The Hunt Begins

Authorities revealed that they have seized the servers of these 47 exchanges and are currently tracking down their criminal users using transaction details and IP addresses obtained from the servers.

When users visit the websites of seized exchanges, they are immediately redirected to a page called “Operation Final Exchange”. There the authorities send a warning to the criminals, stating that the anonymity they had been promised by the exchanges is false.

The notice says:

We found their servers and seized them: development servers, production servers, backup servers. We have your data, and therefore we have yours. Transactions, log data, IP addresses… Our search for traces begins. see you soon

Geographical limitations

None of the cybercriminals have been arrested, as German law enforcement noted that most of the perpetrators reside in countries that could offer them protection.

“Since cybercriminals often reside abroad and are tolerated or even protected by some countries, they often remain inaccessible to German law enforcement,” they said.

However, authorities are confident that the extensive protected user and transaction data from the seized exchanges will be useful during ongoing investigations.

However, the operators of the seized exchanges face serious legal charges, including money laundering and operating illegal trading platforms under sections 127 and 261 of the German Penal Code (StGB) . The operators face several years in prison if found guilty of these charges.

The ongoing crackdown highlights the German government’s commitment to dismantling cybercriminal infrastructure in the crypto space. The country’s authorities had earlier this year unloaded more than $3 billion of seized BTC.

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