PANews reported on December 10 that according to the Procuratorate Daily, on November 18, the Jianhu County Procuratorate of Jiangsu Province organized police officers to go deep into communities and streets to distribute brochures, explain the main forms of virtual currency crimes, and interpret the legal risks of virtual currency transactions in conjunction with a new type of criminal case handled by virtual currency transactions. In this case, three "post-95" guys used virtual currency transactions as a medium to engage in the "business" of buying and selling foreign exchange. In just a few months, they completed more than 650 transactions and exchanged nearly 30 million yuan in foreign exchange. After the Jianhu County Procuratorate filed a public prosecution, Lin and three others were recently sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of five years to one year and six months for the crime of illegal business operations, and each was fined.
Lin and a Nigerian national purchased Tether on Binance with the country's legal currency, Naira, and then transferred the money to Lin's account on Binance. Lin sold the Tether to a domestic currency dealer and exchanged it for RMB, which was then transferred to a bank account in China provided by the Nigerian national. Lin determined the purchase price based on a 5% discount on the listing price of Tether that day, and then sold it to a domestic currency dealer at the listing price to earn the difference.
The prosecutor reviewed and believed that Lin and three others used virtual currency as a medium to provide cross-border exchange and payment services to earn exchange rate differences. They took advantage of the special properties of virtual currency to circumvent national foreign exchange supervision, affecting the effectiveness of foreign exchange management and the stability of legal exchange rates, and disrupting the normal order of the financial market. They should be held criminally responsible for illegal business operations in accordance with the law.
