First, because US citizens still traded on the exchange. (mostly through a VPN); and second, Bitmex was offering a synthetic USD product. That's worse than being a non-regulated entity that offers real dollars.
I hope I'm not the only one that finds this completely ridiculous. What right does the U.S. Federal Government have to prosecute people who aren't even operating within their jurisdiction? This is nothing but imperialism and a captured government trying to shut down competitors to U.S.-based regulated exchanges from more crypto-friendly countries.
everything anyone told you about the US dollar use being needed to establish jurisdiction was a lie, I have literally only heard that from crypto people, arent these the same people that used to say “litecoin is asic proof because its memory hard” lmao
right, not new news.
The criminal charges are around the Bank Secrecy Act and Conspiracy to circumvent some Bank Secrecy Act requirements
What right? Its not a right its a privilege the US has that most countries around the world will listen to it. Many countries have laws to exercise jurisdiction outside of their borders, they’re just irrelevant. They are irrelevant markets, irrelevant geopolitically, have no resources to pursue or even bother charging people, faces actual consequences from trading partners if they did try, everything is distinctly opposite for the US.
> But please, expand on the "America bad" argument you were making. Very interesting stuff.
It wasn't an America bad argument, it was a global hegemony acknowledgement.
How do you read me talking about how almost everywhere is literally "irrelevant", my words, by all metrics and get an "America bad" argument out of it?
> What right does the U.S. Federal Government have to prosecute people who aren't even operating within their jurisdiction?
The jurisdiction of any sovereign state is whatever that state says it's jurisdiction is; extraterritorial jurisdiction is not at all uncommon.
In order for an entity to have externally-imposed limits on its jurisdiction, it would have to be answerable to a superior soveriegnty (which would itself either be or be answerable to, perhaps through more layers, an entity without such limitation.)
Ed: From the indictment, page 8: "BitMEX personnel... conducted BitMEX operations from an office in Manhattan, New York, including but not limited to customer support, business development, and marketing, involving customers located in the United States and elsewhere ."
If[0] they posted on American forums or solicited customers on American-hosted sites, they operated in the US for the purposes of the law. You don't have to physically be somewhere to be subject to the law there. Ditto wire and mail fraud that originates overseas.
Mailing a pipebomb from Canada to the US is illegal in Canada, but it's also illegal in the US, even if it was done by a Canadian citizen who didn't step foot here.
Operating outside American AML/KYC law is not quite the same as mailing a pipe bomb, but the jurisdictional issue is hard to distinguish.
Apparently, they are of the opinion that Bitmex did operate in the US:
> With the opportunities and advantages of operating a financial institution in the United States comes the obligation for those businesses to do their part to help in driving out crime and corruption.
America is the one world govt, it created this world order we live in, it provide(d) protection and unmolested trade routes to everyone in the world. Hell US even protected Vietnam's trade during the Vietnam War, no country in the world has done that in past.
Of course that world order is coming down fast because nobody in the US cares about maintaining it as much as they are interested in proclaiming it.
Tough in this case it might be not enough to make authorities from other countries to cooperate. The website is still running and withdrawals are working. For some reason the domain isnt seized.
It's not illegal to offer services to non-US customers, so seizing the domain would be disrupting a legitimate business that clears $500M - $5B in daily volume. BitMEX isn't Silk Road.
The press release said they knew, so probably there's written evidence (emails, chat logs) of them discussing having US customers.
One way they might know is by seeing people posting online about how they used VPNs to get around the block. Crypto traders are often bad at being subtle.
It also alleges that they solicited American customers, which presumably they also have evidence of. For instance, maybe advertising on American websites or posting on forums they knew were frequented by Americans, etc. Maybe they posted winking messages that told Americans how to get around the IP ban? All sorts of possibilities.
Edit: from the indictment, page 7: "internal BitMEX records reflected thousands of BitMEX accounts with United States location information that were enabled for trading." So people volunteered their location information to BitMEX.
Page 12: "the defendants, knew that specific
customers, residing in the United States, continued to access BitMEX' s platform... DELO and DWYER knowingly allowed one of these customers to access BitMEX using a non-U. S. passport in the name of a third party that did not belong to this customer. DELO also allowed another customer to continue to access a BitMEX trading account despite this customer being "US based," because "[h]e's famous in Bitcoin," and falsely changed this customer' s internal country of residence to a country other than the United States."
I’m not from the US. I had an account there and once I’ve logged in to the site through a personal vpn vps located in Texas. They’ve requested KYC data and thread closing my account almost immediately. Happened last year.
Trivially: ask the VPN operators where they were connecting from. If they really don't store logs, ask them to.
Less trivially: other, out-of-band clues based on support emails sent to BitMEX; location information in BitMEX profile; same username on other platforms and mention of location; that sort of thing
There was no synthetic USD, that is clear. What they do is display the average price of BTC from external crypto exchanges. No USD or Synthetic USD was ever exchanged on Bitmex.
