$730,000, 116 successful card charges, age 35—the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has just laid bare a money-laundering pipeline for a telecom fraud scheme.
The final stop was Coinbase. From March to May 2020, Timothy Wadsworth used unauthorized credit card details supplied by his accomplices to run 310 transactions through Stripe, totaling about $1.67 million. 116 transactions went through, bringing in $730,000; the money first landed in bank accounts he controlled, then was converted to BTC and sent to his accomplices. The sentence: 51 months in federal prison, plus $811,000 in restitution.
But something else stands out to me: Why do the people at the very end of the chain keep getting caught? What about the people handling the card charges in the middle? Coinbase was actually the most passive victim in this chain—the money didn’t come from customers it had brought in; the fraudsters chose it themselves. Yet now it has to pay $811,000 in restitution and take the blame for someone else’s choice of platform.
KYC is supposed to make the middle layers harder to investigate, but the exchanges at the end are easy targets because they’re the only ones in the whole chain still linked to bank accounts. When it comes down to it, regulators have always really wanted to police the off-chain layers, not the on-chain ones.
So where should Coinbase have stepped in—at the Stripe end, or when the funds were withdrawn? Pick a side in the comments 🔥
#加密市场观察 #多空辩论 #BTC
The final stop was Coinbase. From March to May 2020, Timothy Wadsworth used unauthorized credit card details supplied by his accomplices to run 310 transactions through Stripe, totaling about $1.67 million. 116 transactions went through, bringing in $730,000; the money first landed in bank accounts he controlled, then was converted to BTC and sent to his accomplices. The sentence: 51 months in federal prison, plus $811,000 in restitution.
But something else stands out to me: Why do the people at the very end of the chain keep getting caught? What about the people handling the card charges in the middle? Coinbase was actually the most passive victim in this chain—the money didn’t come from customers it had brought in; the fraudsters chose it themselves. Yet now it has to pay $811,000 in restitution and take the blame for someone else’s choice of platform.
KYC is supposed to make the middle layers harder to investigate, but the exchanges at the end are easy targets because they’re the only ones in the whole chain still linked to bank accounts. When it comes down to it, regulators have always really wanted to police the off-chain layers, not the on-chain ones.
So where should Coinbase have stepped in—at the Stripe end, or when the funds were withdrawn? Pick a side in the comments 🔥
#加密市场观察 #多空辩论 #BTC