Dutch Police Arrested a Man for Allegedly Laundering Millions With Crypto

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The cyber­crime team of the Cen­tral Nether­lands police arrest­ed a 39-year-old res­i­dent of Vee­nen­daal on sus­pi­cion of laun­der­ing tens of mil­lions of euros via stolen cryptocurrencies.

The police also sug­gest­ed that the indi­vid­ual amassed his dig­i­tal asset hold­ings through fake updates from cryp­to wal­let Electrum.

The Latest Crypto Scam in the Netherlands

The Nether­lands’ police report­ed the arrest of the wrong­do­er on its offi­cial web­site. Accord­ing to the inves­ti­ga­tion, once steal­ing amounts of Bit­coin, he repeat­ed­ly con­vert­ed it into Mon­ero and vice ver­sa through the decen­tral­ized exchange Bisq. Thus, his fraud­u­lent trans­ac­tions were hard to be iden­ti­fied with­out thor­ough examination.

Local law enforce­ment agents, though, con­duct­ed a joint oper­a­tion with the cen­tral cyber­crime team to mon­i­tor spe­cif­ic BTC trans­ac­tions and even­tu­al­ly traced those activ­i­ties to the 39-year-old. At the time of his arrest, he was in the vil­lage of Veenendaal.

Over the course of his fraud, the police esti­mat­ed that he had laun­dered tens of mil­lions of euros worth of cryp­tocur­ren­cies. The author­i­ties con­fis­cat­ed that amount and searched his home, where they seized “data car­ri­ers” to help the ongo­ing investigations.

To col­lect his bit­coin pos­ses­sions, the indi­vid­ual alleged­ly used a mali­cious soft­ware update for the Elec­trum wal­let. It is an open-source BTC wal­let appli­ca­tion that allows users to man­age their dig­i­tal assets. With­out giv­ing addi­tion­al details, the Dutch police stated:

“The funds were stolen after phish­ing with mali­cious Elec­trum soft­ware pushed through mali­cious servers.”

A few days after detain­ing him, the author­i­ties sent the man home, where he remains a sus­pect in con­duct­ing a mul­ti-mil­lion cryp­tocur­ren­cy scam.

Crypto’s Popularity Grows in the Netherlands

Cryp­tocur­ren­cy fraud­u­lent schemes usu­al­ly occur in regions where dig­i­tal asset adop­tion is at a high lev­el. On that note, it is worth not­ing that 14% of Dutch house­holds have expo­sure to bit­coin or alt­coins (accord­ing to a sur­vey car­ried out by the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank). Thus, the Nether­lands ranked first in that sta­tis­tic sur­pass­ing coun­tries like Bel­gium, Ger­many, Italy, Spain, and France.

Sim­i­lar to oth­er research, the ECB esti­mat­ed that the rich pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion finds cryp­to more intrigu­ing than those in the low­er income brack­ets. Well-edu­cat­ed, young men rep­re­sent the largest chunk of investors, the insti­tu­tion added.

To lim­it cryp­tocur­ren­cy scams, the ECB (specif­i­cal­ly its Pres­i­dent Chris­tine Lagarde) has sug­gest­ed numer­ous times that the sec­tor should func­tion under strict rules.

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