Crypto scammers took 4 of 10 positions in the IRS’s ranking of the year’s most high-profile cases

What’s new? The Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has compiled its own ranking of the agency’s most high-profile cases over the past year. The defendants in the top 10 cases of tax, unemployment, and copyright fraud received from 12 months to 40 years in prison. Four of them are cryptocurrency-related, including Oyster Pearl cryptocurrency creator Amir Bruno Elmaani, Silk Road darknet marketplace hacker James Zhong, Bitcoin ATM network founder Ian Freeman and OneCoin crypto pyramid scheme co-founder Karl Sebastian Greenwood.

The IRS’s ranking

What else is known? Amir Bruno Elmaani, also known as Bruno Block, received 4 years in prison and a $5,5 million fine for tax offenses related to the Pearl token. In September 2017, Elmaani began promoting a new cryptocurrency that would purportedly become native to the Oyster Protocol blockchain storage platform in development.

Elmaani involved family and friends in the scheme, using their accounts to raise money from the coin’s sale. In 2018, he spent more than $13 million to buy yachts, real estate, and stakes in a company in the chemical industry while failing to file tax returns, resulting in a $5,5 million loss to the budget. This incident ranked eighth.

James Zhong was sentenced to one year and one day in prison for embezzling 50,000 bitcoins from the Silk Road darknet marketplace in September 2012. For 10 years, Zhong diverted the assets to various addresses to conceal their source. The authorities confiscated his BTC, which grew to $3,4 billion over 11 years, an 80% stake in real estate development company RE&D Investments, as well as cash, gold, and silver bullion. Zhong was ranked seventh on the list.

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Ian Freeman received 96 months in prison, two years of supervised release, a $40 000 fine for laundering over $10 million in fraudulent proceeds by exchanging fiat for bitcoins, and individual victim compensation. Officials note that the convict failed to register his Bitcoin ATM network with the US Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and failed to implement KYC mechanisms into the devices.

Freeman and his accomplices diverted transaction fees to banks where accounts were specifically set up for purportedly religious institutions, including the Shire Free Church and the Crypto Church of New Hampshire. Freeman advised clients to describe their deposits as donations to the church when filing statements. He ranked fourth in the top.

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Karl Sebastian Greenwood, a Swedish and British citizen, was sentenced to 20 years in prison and fined $300 million for organizing the OneCoin project. It was launched in 2014, based in Sofia, and sold a fraudulent cryptocurrency with the same name through a global multi-level-marketing network. Millions of victims have invested over $4 billion in the project. Greenwood is in third place in the ranking.

Greenwood’s accomplice Ruja Ignatova is still in the top 10 wanted criminals by the FBI. At the same time, the media wrote that she was killed by a drug lord on a yacht in the Ionian Sea back in 2018.