PANews reported on January 30 that recently, the People's Court of Pingjiang County, Hunan Province, announced several criminal judgments involving the BKEX exchange, clearly defining the contract transactions on the platform as gambling activities, and holding relevant employees and agents criminally responsible for the crime of opening a casino.
The verdict shows that BKEX was founded by Ji Jiaming in Chengdu in 2018, mainly providing virtual currency exchange and spot trading services. In 2021, the platform launched a perpetual contract trading function, where users placed bets with USDT and used high leverage to bet on the price rise and fall of virtual currencies such as BTC and ETH, suspected of using the Internet to gather people for gambling. As of the time of the incident, the BKEX platform had accumulated a net profit of approximately 54.798 million USDT (equivalent to approximately 300 million yuan), with 270,000 contract trading users, of which more than 60,000 were active users.
Since the founder Ji Jiaming is on the run, this case mainly targets platform employees and agents. The verdict involves 2 employees and 6 agents. One of the employees, Zheng Lei, served as a wallet engineer and was responsible for technical support for fund flow. He was sentenced to 2 years and 1 month in prison, suspended for 2 years and 1 month, and fined 150,000 yuan; another employee, Wang, was responsible for KYC certification and fund settlement. He was sentenced to 1 year and 11 months in prison and fined 52,000 yuan. Agent Dong was sentenced to 1 year and 6 months in prison, suspended for 1 year and 6 months, and fined 35,000 yuan for developing downline gambling. The relevant illegal gains have been recovered and turned over to the state treasury.
The court found that all the defendants were accomplices, and some of them received lighter punishments because they pleaded guilty and actively returned the stolen money.
Earlier news in 2023, BKEX Exchange: Due to suspected "money laundering" and cooperating with the police in collecting evidence, it will suspend withdrawals .