Dirty money and cryptocurrency: how the thriving cryptocurrency market can be exploited

<p>According to cybercrime experts, as the legitimate use of digital currencies grows, so does the abuse.</p> <p>When cops apprehended scammer Evan Leslie McMahon in March 2019, they discovered much more than just the bootleg Netflix logins that allowed his clients to watch The Witcher on the cheap.</p> <p>The hacker in his early twenties also had nine electronic wallets containing an alphabet soup of cryptocurrencies – bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum, digibyte, XRP, stratis, bitcoin gold, and litecoin – that he purchased with the proceeds of his crimes.</p> <p>McMahon avoided jail when he was sentenced in April last year for "providing a circumvention service" and "dealing with the proceeds of crime," receiving an intensive correction order that allowed him to serve his two-and-a-half-month sentence in the community.</p> <p>What does it mean for you that Australian banks are becoming more open to cryptocurrency?</p> <p>However, he forfeited the cryptocurrency, which was initially worth $460,000 but had risen to an estimated value of $1.2 million by the time of his sentencing, making it the largest stash of tokens seized by the commonwealth to date.</p> <p>According to court documents, McMahon used 175 PayPal accounts with aliases such as Zac Kentish, Izabella Sjogren, and Samuel Binns to collect fees from customers of his websites, HyperGen, WickedGen, Autoflix, and AccountBot.</p> <p>According to federal authorities, he then converted some of the proceeds into cryptocurrency.</p> <p>PayPal declined to comment when asked how McMahon managed to open 175 accounts with the company and what this said about its anti-money laundering systems.</p> <p>"We devote significant resources to identifying, investigating, and stopping improper or potentially illegal activity on PayPal," a spokesman said.</p> <p>Seizures of cryptocurrency are increasing.</p> <p>According to Austrac, the criminal use of cryptocurrency is no longer limited to online scammers like McMahon, who ran a series of websites selling logins to N