Trung Nguyen was arrested after accepting money from an undercover police officer; he conducted multiple transactions and sent them Bitcoin.
An American man was sentenced to six years in prison for operating a cash-to-Bitcoin exchange service that prosecutors described as "no questions asked," and was ordered to forfeit millions.
The Boston U.S. Attorney's Office stated on May 22 that Boston Federal Court Judge Richard Stearns sentenced Trung Nguyen, from Danvers, Massachusetts, to six years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and ordered him to forfeit $1.5 million.
Prosecutors stated that from September 2017 to October 2020, Nguyen operated an unlicensed remittance business called National Vending, using various techniques learned in online courses to evade authorities.
As part of the course, Nguyen learned how to conceal his actual business from banks, cryptocurrency exchanges, and government authorities, disguising it as a vending machine company that accepted cash deposits, having a fictitious vendor list, and avoiding the use of the term "Bitcoin" as much as possible.
According to prosecutors, Nguyen's clientele included several fraud victims who were tricked by overseas scammers into exchanging cash for Bitcoin, as well as a drug dealer who transferred $250,000 in cash through 10 transactions in 2018.
The U.S. Department of Justice stated that Nguyen exchanged over one million dollars for Bitcoin and "deliberately did not" register with the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), despite federal anti-money laundering regulations requiring him to do so.
Prosecutors claimed that Nguyen also "failed to submit any suspicious activity reports or currency transaction reports for any of these transactions, including cash transactions over $10,000."
Undercover police arrested Nguyen.
Prosecutors stated that Nguyen often met with clients and accepted large amounts of cash, which is why he was caught.
The indictment from May 2023 alleges that in several meetings with undercover law enforcement, he accepted cash and sent Bitcoin, charging slightly more than a 5% commission.
The indictment states that Nguyen used encrypted communication applications and "techniques that made Bitcoin transactions harder to trace" and split cash deposits into smaller amounts, depositing them at different branches of the same bank over several days to evade authorities' attention.
Nguyen was charged with operating an unlicensed remittance business and two counts of money laundering. In June 2023, he pleaded not guilty to all charges.
In November, a jury found him guilty of operating an unlicensed remittance business and guilty on one count of money laundering, but not guilty on another count of money laundering.