Tag: Virtual Currency

Across U.S., Chinese Bitcoin Mines Draw National Security Scrutiny

Media Library

When a company with Chinese origins broke ground last year on a crypto-mining operation in Cheyenne, Wyo., a team at Microsoft that assesses national security threats sounded the alarm. Not only was the site next door to a Microsoft data center that supported the Pentagon — it was about a mile away from an Air Force base that controlled nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles. The location could allow the Chinese to “pursue full-spectrum intelligence collection operations,” the Microsoft team wrote in an August 2022 report to the Committee on Foreign Investment…

U.S. Indicts Four Men in Scheme to Launder Cryptocurrency for North Korea

Chin@Strategy

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said on Monday that it had indicted four men on charges of laundering virtual currency stolen by an infamous North Korean online criminal syndicate as part of a far-reaching scheme to buy goods with U.S. dollars and evade international sanctions. The charges, filed in three cases in federal court in Washington, outline a complex multiyear effort to launder cryptocurrency obtained by the Lazarus Group, an organization linked to espionage, online theft and cyberattacks, including the 2014 breach of Sony Pictures. The scheme involved a relatively…

In FTX Collapse, Binance Sees a Chance to Become the New Face of Crypto

Chin@Strategy

Mr. Zhao founded Binance after a brief career in finance, including a stint at Bloomberg, where he built trading software. He created the exchange when he was living in Shanghai. But soon after, the Chinese government banned cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance from operating in the country, and many of the company’s employees fled. Mr. Zhao maintains an active presence on Twitter but isn’t always easy to track down, having moved between Japan, Singapore, Lithuania, Malta and Dubai. Binance’s lack of a fixed headquarters is in keeping with the trend of…