As per a report released by the English-language local media firm, FocusTaiwan on 18th January, seven people were found guilty and prosecuted in Taiwan as they were involved in managing a Fraudulent crypto investment scheme.
Post scrutiny of the witness testimonies, bank accounts and other pieces of evidence, the defendants were found guilty and were officially accused violating the rules and regulations associated with multiple banking and business related laws under Taiwan’s Banking and Multi-Level Marketing Supervision acts. This team of seven people were indulged in running a fraudulent Bitcoin (BTC) investment scheme and were arrested during mid June of the last year. As per the report of FocusTaiwan, the fraudulent scheme started by the team assured all the investors a return of up to 355 percent.
The scheme was started around Oct 2016 and Majority of the investors were never able to receive any substantial returns on their investments until February 2018, and later the returns stopped coming entirely by April 2018. Although the scheme never materialized due to the massive sell-off noted in the market in the previous year and the scheme was a failure, the prosecutors believe that even if the scheme would have been successful running such a scheme was a violation of the law due to the promise made and as such the accused people have also been charged with additional allegations.
As reported by the local media firm several people took part in the investment scheme. The country’s Ministry of Justice (MJIB) appointed an investigation Bureau to look into the matter which noted that the accused group had managed to accumulate around $51 million as investments in such schemes, which involved about 1000 people who got cheated in such fraudulent scheme.
The Government in Taiwan has taken measures to control cryptocurrencies and to block the usage of bitcoin for illegal activities such as money-laundering and terrorism funding. For this purpose, the Taiwanese Cabinet had passed the ordinance for the changes to the Money Laundering Control Act and the Terrorism Financing Prevention Act in September 2018.
In last December, Italy’s securities regulator had deferred the operations of two projects on the grounds of offering fraudulent crypto investment schemes.
