“The Department of Justice is targeting crypto exchanges along with the “mixers and tumblers” that obscure the trail of transactions, said Eun Young Choi, who was appointed director of the agency’s national cryptocurrency enforcement team last year.””The DoJ is targeting companies that commit crimes themselves or allow them to happen, such as enabling money laundering, she said.”“But on top of that, they’re allowing for all the other criminal actors to easily profit from their crimes and cash out in ways that are obviously problematic to us,” she added.”The focus on platforms would “send a deterrent message” to businesses that are skirting anti-money laundering or client identification rules, and who were not investing in solid compliance and risk mitigation procedures.”The DoJ’s crypto unit aims to bring more enforcement actions targeting investment scams, as the volume of funds lost to such schemes has ballooned from approximately $900mn in 2021 to more than $2.5bn last year, according to victims’ reports to the FBI.””Choi highlighted “pig butchering” schemes, which are named after a Chinese phrase referencing fattening pigs for slaughter, and involve scammers building relationships with victims over the long term.””The DoJ is also focusing on thefts and hacks involving decentralised finance, or DeFi, Choi said, particularly “chain bridges”, where users can exchange different types of digital tokens, or nascent projects with codes that are vulnerable to these attacks.”
