NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- A 36-year-old Florida man was sentenced by a Manhattan federal court to six months of home detention for knowingly allowing his cryptocurrency trading platform to act as a money laundering tool, the Department of Justice announced Friday.
Arthur Hayes’ company BitMEX failed to implement anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) programs and failed to file suspicious activity reports on nearly 600 specific suspicious transactions.
Prosecutors said Hayes facilitated more than $200 million in suspicious exchanges.
In 2015 Hayes and the other two BitMEX co-founders, Benjamin Delo and Sam Reed, told U.S. regulators they had taken steps to ensure trading could not take place in the U.S., but they left those measures intentionally weak.
The platform also aggressively advertised its lack of AML and KYC restrictions, broadcasting to the world that the site was a haven for money laundering.
This remained the status quo for the platform until the trio were indicted in September 2020.
“While building a cryptocurrency platform that profited him millions of dollars, Arthur Hayes willfully defied U.S. law that requires businesses to do their part to help in preventing crime and corruption” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. “He intentionally failed to implement and maintain even basic anti-money laundering policies, which allowed BitMEX to operate as a platform in the shadows of the financial markets.”
In addition to the 6 months house arrest, Hayes must also pay a $10 million fine.
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