The founders of BitMEX, Benjamin Delo and Arthur Hayes have to deposit a fine each for disregarding and mocking the Bank Secrecy Act. Their actions are also being called as providing a platform that helped in money laundering as per DOJ. Although the founders of BitMEX have fought for a long time, they pleaded guilty at the end of this prolonged and tedious litigation and accepted that they violated the Bank Secrecy Act.
Arthur Hayes and Benjamin Delo agreed that they intentionally did not implement, maintain and establish the program of AML at their future exchanges and derivatives of crypto in Bitmex. The company of BitMEX provides a platform for trading crypto and is based on Seychelles that presents features of crypto, margin trading with a limit of 100x, and derivatives. Once the service was offered without taking proper KYC details and verifications from AML procedures of the Americans.
How Was BitMEX Found Guilty?
On 24th February, the DOJ declared that such irregularities in compliance led to the incidents of money laundering, and thus the platform was found guilty. The offenders pleaded guilty and were made to pay $10 million each as a fine of criminal offense on the trial date in March.
The DOJ attorney stated that the company was built to disregard necessary obligations and they had no intentions to prevent such money laundering incidents. There are even rumors that Hayes bribed the local government of Seychelles which was nothing compared to his profit. Delo and Hayes stated that in spite of the fact that BitMEX is an American-based company that was operating from 2015 to 2020, not many Americans were using it. This claim was rejected by the DOJ and at the end of January 2021, all the customers were verified using a KYC or AML process.
