Suspicious Increase In Crypto Activity Being Investigated By Japanese Police

By Rishma Banerjee

Japan’s National Police Agency (NPA), recently announced that they have noticed a huge hike in reports of suspicious cryptocurrency transactions between the month of January and October of 2018 and were thus, going to investigate it.

A total of 5944 reports profile from cryptocurrency exchanges which were possibly linked to issues like money laundering and tax evasion. The number of cases reported in 2017 699 and thus represent an eight fold increase.

Japan has one of the most suitable atmosphere and progressive regulatory system for cryptocurrency within active and energetic market. They have continuously strived to provide a secure business environment, by tightening and updating their regulations on trading and exchanges. They is 2017, made is mandatory for all exchange to report any suspicious trading activity. However these laws have not done enough to prevent the rise of cases of illegal activities. They now require all cryptocurrency exchanges to be screened and registered by the Financial Services Agency (FSA).

The escalation of this crime, however, has ringed many alarm bells with JPY 660 million stolen from crypto exchanges and individual wallets swelling to a huge JPY 60 billion in only the first half of 2018.

An NPA official commented,

“It’s already been some time since the reporting system began, and it has been embraced by the industry through guidance from the Financial Services Agency.”

The National Safety Commission recently released its latest report on the condition of the industry in terms of the misuse of cryptocurrency funds, an issue that is being hailed by many nations’ leaders as being the main deterrent towards civic adoption by central governments and banking institutions.

The major problem-areas revealed by the report include factors such as reuse of the same face photo by several users with different names and birth dates, multiple trading accounts initiated from a single IP address, logins from overseas on accounts with Japan addresses, as well as registration of out-of-use mobile phone numbers.

FSA registrations are thus going on, with 16 recent exchanges passing the screening process and another three awaiting the green signal, which reiterates the FSA’s stand that it has this situation under control.