Press Release Today TheBitTimes.com

The Commodities and Futures Trading Commission ( CFTC ) has released its annual report for 2023, detailing a record number of enforcement actions this year — 50% of which involved crypto or digital assets. Released on Tuesday, the CFTC’s annual results for fiscal year 2023 outlined several high-profile cases that have reverberated through the crypto industry. Charges brought against Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX, Alameda Research, and his co-conspirators received first mention in the report, followed by its case against Binance and its founder, Changpeng Zhao. This year’s “litigation victories,” as the CFTC puts it, featured several more crypto cases . July’s complaints against Celsius and its chief exec Alex Mashinsky made the honor roll, along with charges against Avraham Eisenberg and a first-of-its-kind enforcement against Ooki DAO. Not to mention a whopping $1.7 billion civil monetary penalty (CVM) against Mirror Trading International, marking th...

A New Jersey resident, John Michael Musbach, has been sentenced to 78 months in prison following his attempt to hire a hitman via the dark web to assassinate a minor he had previously sexually exploited. The objective of this heinous act was to prevent the 14-year-old victim from testifying against him. Musbach, 34, paid over $20,000 in bitcoin to a fraudulent murder-for-hire website on the dark web, intending to have the child murdered. His actions were exposed in January 2019 when Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents in New Jersey received data detailing communications between the administrators of the dark web site and its users, who were seeking to hire hitmen. In May 2016, a user under the pseudonym “agentisai” was found to be seeking the murder of a 14-year-old child. After confirming that a minor was an acceptable target and disclosing a budget of $20,000, agentisai transferred 40.64 bitcoin to the site and placed an order. The site’s administra...