Tag: NY AG

NYAG to crypto companies: ‘Play by the rules or we will shut you down’

The New York attorney general issued a stern warning to crypto companies and crypto investors on Monday. Crypto firms doing business in the state must play by the rules or face consequences, she said. And to investors, she underscored the hazards of dabbling in the crypto markets.

The two-part warning from NY attorney general Letitia James comes on the heels of a settlement agreement with Bitfinex and Tether, wherein the two closely related companies agreed to pay an $18.5 million penalty. And an effort to shut down Coinseed, a crypto-trading app that prosecutors allege ignored securities laws and defrauded thousands of investors. 

An unstable market

In a warning to investors, the NY attorney general underscored the numerous risks of investing in bitcoin. Namely, volatility, difficulty in cashing out, conflicts of interest, market manipulation and limited protection from fraud.

“I’m warning New Yorkers and investors across the country that investing in this unstable market is not prudent and could cause devastating losses,” she said in a tweet.

“Many operators of virtual currency trading platforms are themselves heavily invested in virtual currencies, and trade on their own platforms without oversight. The financial interests of these operators may conflict with your interests,” she said.

She went on to add that “even if you purchase a well-established virtual currency from a more reputable trading platform, the price could crash in an instant.”

In effect she appeared to be saying that even if you are buying bitcoin on a regulated exchange, such as Coinbase in the U.S., your money could be here today, gone tomorrow.

Heed the law

In the second part of her warning, an industry alert, the NY attorney general warned crypto firms that deviation from the law will not be tolerated.

“If you don’t play by the rules, we will not hesitate to shut down your operations,” Attorney General James in a tweet.

Commodity broker-dealers, salespersons, and investment advisors in New York need to register with the Office of the Attorney General. And under the law, virtual currencies qualify as commodities—or securities. New York crypto firms that don’t register with the OAG, are in violation of the Martin Act.

Penalties include “permanent injunction from selling, offering to sell, or acting as a broker or investment advisor concerning securities or commodities in New York, as well as disgorgement of profits and restitution to victims.”

What does this mean?

Before the hammer comes down on Tether, which could cause a crash in the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, we can expect to see more warnings from regulators and prosecutors about the perils of investing in crypto.

If Tether is shut down and the price of bitcoin collapses as a result—regulators want to make sure that investors are well aware of the risks they face in buying bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency.

The NY attorney general isn’t the one done playing around. Treasury Security Janet Yellen issued a warning about bitcoin last week, saying it is inefficient for transactions and often used for “illicit finance.”

And if Gary Gensler is confirmed as the new chair of the SEC,* we may see a slap down on coins that fail the Howey test—including some of those listed on Coinbase, a firm that is planning to go public soon.

Updated March 2, 2021, to clarify that Gensler is Biden’s pick for chair. He still needs to be confirmed.

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Tether, Bitfinex to pay $18.5M to NYAG, cease trading in New York

Bitfinex and Tether have settled with the office of the New York attorney general in an investigation that began two years ago. 

The sister companies will pay $18.5 million in penalties to the state for violations of the Martin Act, according to a statement issued by the NY attorney general. Per the terms of the settlement agreement, Bitfinex and Tether are banned from trading in the state and must submit quarterly reports to ensure they are complying with the prohibition.

Tether claimed that tethers were backed by real dollars, when they were not backed by real dollars, the NY attorney general alleges.

“Bitfinex and Tether recklessly and unlawfully covered-up massive financial losses to keep their scheme going and protect their bottom lines,” NY Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. “Tether’s claims that its virtual currency was fully backed by U.S. dollars at all times was a lie. These companies obscured the true risk investors faced and were operated by unlicensed and unregulated individuals and entities dealing in the darkest corners of the financial system.”

The investigation was made public in April 2019, when the NY attorney general revealed that Bitfinex, an unregulated crypto exchange, dipped into Tether’s cash reserves to cover up the fact that it had lost access to $850 million held by its Panamanian payment processor Crypto Capital. Having lost access to those funds, Bitfinex struggled to meet customer withdrawal requests. 

Tether and Bitfinex neither admit or deny the findings in the settlement. And their attitude is one of “We have put this matter behind us now.” Here is their official statement, which emphasizes that they have repaid their loan to Tether—an estimated $750 million—though they still won’t say how much they “borrowed” exactly. 

Per the terms of the settlement, the office of the NY attorney general cannot bring any claims or lawsuits against Tether or Bitfinex for matters relating to findings in the petition. However, it still has the right to enforce the settlement, if the companies fall short.

And falling short is something that could well happen.

If you read closely, these provisions are a big ask from two companies that have been highly secretive about their financial dealings from the get-go. To continue on, they will need to submit to an impossible level of transparency.

For the next two years, Tether and Bitfinex will have to show proof that they segregate client, reserve, and operational accounts. The NY attorney general claims the firms have commingled funds in the past—and at one point, $61.5 million of Tether’s reserves were kept in a trust account held by its general counsel at the Bank of Montreal.

On a quarterly basis, the two firms have to publish the categories of assets backing tethers—e.g., cash, loans, securities, etc. They will also need to specify the percentages of each category, and spell out whether a category constitutes a loan or receivable.

This is something Tether has never done before. It has never been clear about what is backing tethers, whether those are third-party loans, cryptocurrencies—such as bitcoin—shares in a Bahamian bank, or whatever.

Tether and Bitfinex also need to provide the office of the NY attorney general a list of their payment processors, along with location and contact information for those entities, and information regarding what due diligence procedures they are putting in place to ensure the payment processors don’t leave them high and dry as before. They will also need to provide that same information to their customers upon request when associated with a deposit or withdrawal. 

Crypto payment processors run shadowy operations, and this stipulation is going to make Tether and Bitfinex a difficult client. Recall, the firms had no formal agreement with Crypto Capital when they handed over $1 billion for safekeeping.

Crypto media outlets and bitcoiners are painting the Tether and Bitfinex settlement like it is a big win and $18.5 million is pennies for a company that has so far issued $34 billion worth of tethers—but I could not disagree more.

The NY attorney general is effectively saying, pay the fine and go right ahead with your legitimate business. The problem is, Tether and Bitfinex may have no legitimate business—and fulfilling these obligations may turn out to be impossible.

Related stories:

NYAG/Tether, Bitfinex settlement reveals commingling of funds, years of shenanigans

NYAG to crypto companies: ‘Play by the rules or we will shut you down’

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News: Tether prints $1B at a time, Tesla buys bitcoin, Roubini calls Saylor a cokehead, scammers hijack QuadrigaCX website

We are midway through February. Tether has surpassed $32 billion in tethers and appears to be quite proud of the fact. BTC is scratching $49,000 and ETH is over $1,800. There is so much craziness now in the crypto markets with shitcoins pumping galore, and big companies getting in on the bitcoin Ponzi.

In the meantime, I am concerned crypto is going retail again. Friends are calling and asking about bitcoin. One of my friend’s offspring was talking up dogecoin on Facebook. And I am overhearing conversations about crypto in grocery stores and parking lots—flashbacks of 2017, but this is worse. Retailers are going to get hurt all over again.

Another reminder, I have a Patreon account. If you want to support my writing, please consider subscribing. I’m currently making $572 a month on Patreon, which is fantastic because I can now buy decent bottles of wine. But at some point, I would love to bring that up closer to $2,000 or find a way to make a living doing this.

Tether: We’re done with the baby prints

On Thursday and again on Saturday, Tether issued $1 billion in tethers. These are the biggest single prints of USDT ever—and there were two in a row. Previously, the biggest prints were $600 million, which was rare. Normally, bigger prints were $400 million, and if Tether needed more, it would simply issue several in a row. But that’s clearly not enough to feed the monster now. 

By monster, I mean this snowball is getting so big, Tether is struggling to manage it. Seventy percent of bitcoin is traded against tethers, and as real money keeps getting siphoned out of the system, Tether needs to create more and more fake dollars to fill the ever-widening chasm. Tethers are counterfeit. They are not real dollars, but they are treated as such on offshore exchanges.

You can’t have a system built entirely on fake money. Eventually, it will collapse under its own weight. We saw this with QuadrigaCX. As soon as enough people tried to cash out, the exchange’s founder Gerald Cotten flew to India and pulled off what appears to have been one of the most bizarre exit scams in history—unless you believe he is really dead.* I’m still getting calls from reporters and filmmakers wondering what the hell happened.

Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino says the $1 billion prints were for replenishments and chain swaps—wherein a customer sends in tethers and gets them reissued on a different blockchain. If it were a chain swap, you would see a corresponding burn. But we aren’t seeing any burns, meaning those tokens went almost immediately into circulation.

Luca Land tracked the first 1 billion print and found that the entire amount—previously, I said “majority,” but Luca says all of it—went to Bitfinex, Huobi, RenrenBit, Binance, and FTX.** The largest recipient was FTX, followed by Binance. Those of us who follow @whale_alert are accustom to seeing tethers flying off to “unknown wallets.” Luca thinks those unknown wallets serve as intermediate wallets to throw us off the trail.

The Block published a story on Thursday, right after Tether’s first monster print, with lots of quotes from Ardoino, who explains that big companies are buying USDT from over-the-counter desks and high-frequency trading firms. This explains the demand for all these tethers, he claims.

“When clients of these firms want to buy bitcoin, they send USD, and then these firms convert USD to USDT to bitcoin. This method is faster and most convenient,” he told The Block. 

Why would someone go to the trouble of converting cash to USDT to buy BTC when they could simply buy BTC directly with cash on a regulated exchange? That makes no sense—unless it involves money laundering and capital flight. Tether does have a big market in Asia, Ardoino said.

Another explanation is that Tether is printing USDT out of thin air, using those to buy bitcoin with alias accounts on unregulated exchanges and cashing out via banked exchanges and OTC trading desks. Or else, they buy BTC and hold onto it as a way to make the markets more illiquid and easier to manipulate. (If they sold all the bitcoin they were buying with tethers, they would crash the markets, so until a new influx of cash comes into the system, they have to hold onto it.)

Coindesk interviewed Nouriel Roubini on CoindeskTV. Of course, he gave it to them straight, calling Tether a criminal enterprise and Michael Saylor a cokehead. The three reporters broke out into giggles. The questions they asked were naive, for instance, how is Tether printing tethers different from what is going on in Washington with all their dollar printing? Roubini made important points and predicts Tether will be dead within the year—read the transcript on my blog.

NY AG Tether investigation update

Tether has agreed to hand over a slew of documents to the NY attorney general showing how they issue tethers, what’s behind tethers, and so on. The original deadline was Jan. 15, but they needed another 30 days and the NY AG was okay with that. We are looking for another court filing to drop at some point after Feb. 15.

Don’t expect miracles anytime soon, though. The NY AG will still need time to take a position on what she has received. I’m sure her office is working with the Department of Justice in their investigation—and passing all the material along to them.

Someone was asking me on Reddit, what can the NY AG actually do to Tether? Answer: She has sweeping investigatory and prosecutorial powers, and she can issue a cease and desist. But ultimately, the U.S. Department of Justice and Homeland Security will be instrumental in taking Bitfinex/Tether down.

To put things in perspective, Tether has been in operation for six years. It took seven years and the coordinated effort of law enforcement in 17 countries to bring down Liberty Reserve. (ABC News)

Tesla buys BTC with clean car credits

The big news of the week was Tesla purchased $1.5 billion of bitcoin, as revealed in its 10-K filing. Here you have a company dedicated to clean energy buying one of the filthiest assets in the world. The bitcoin network requires the energy of a small country like Argentina, Norway or the Netherlands. Musk doesn’t give a hoot about the planet. (My blog)

Just to be clear, $1.5 billion is peanuts. It will support the bitcoin miners for about a month. Of course, on the news of Tesla buying bitcoin, the price of BTC shot up from 39,400 to 48,000 in less than 24 hours. The higher the price of BTC, the faster real money exits the system when the miners sell their 900 newly minted BTC per day.

Michael Burry, the investor from “The Big Short,” said in a series of deleted tweets (apparently, he routinely deletes tweets) that Musk bought BTC to distract from Chinese regulators looking into quality complaints with Tesla vehicles. Burry is shorting Tesla and has called on the electric-vehicle company to issue more stock at its ridiculous price. (Business Insider)

But wait! It’s green energy!

Most of the world doesn’t realize that bitcoin uses a country’s worth of electricity. They think it’s mainly used for ransomware and by criminals to buy drugs and such, so when they learn about bitcoin’s horrendous CO2 production, they become alarmed.

As a result, bitcoiners are desperately scrambling to declare that bitcoin consumes renewable green energy. Most of what they are spouting is blithering nonsense with no facts to support their claims. They are also trying to say that bitcoin consumes less energy than the rest of the financial system, which is simply dumb, as Frances Coppola points out.

Other interesting newsy bits

Gerald Cotten may be dead and buried—or more likely, sipping cocktails on a beach somewhere—but QuadrigaCX sprung to life again! However, it turns out scammers set up an imitation Quadriga website to lure in potential victims. EY, the trustee for the failed exchange, sent out a warning notice. The website has since been taken down. (EasyDNS)

India is set to ban cryptocurrency investments completely. Investors will be given a transition period of three-to-six months after the new law goes into force to liquidate their investments. (Bloomberg Quint)

Crypto Capital money mule Reginald Fowler has three more weeks to find new counsel after he stiffed his previous attorneys. (My blog)

Dogecoin has been pumping thanks to r/wallstreetbets and Musk and others tweeting about it for the lulz. David Gerard wrote a wonderful piece on dogecoin explaining its unique history. (Foreign Policy, paywalled)

Apparently, Elon Musk was tweeting about DOGE for the lulz back in April 2019. (Financial Times)

Dogecoin creator Billy Markus said on Reddit that he sold all his dogecoin in 2015 after he got laid off. He wanted dogecoin to be a force of good, and he is disappointed to see the nonsense “pump and dumping, rampant greed, scamming, bad faith actors.”

The Sydney Morning Herald did a feature on Australian-born-and-raised Greg Dwyer, one of the founders of Bitmex, who was indicted last year for violating anti-money laundering laws, but is still at large. “As recently as July, social media posts suggested Dwyer was in Bermuda, and enjoying all it had to offer.”

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez (R) wants municipal workers to get paid in bitcoin. Aside from the legal and tax ramifications and all the difficulties in setting this up, I’m sure employees will be so happy to wake up and find their paycheck lost 30% of its value whilst they were sleeping. No, this is a terrible idea. (The NY Post)

BNY Mellon, the world’s largest custody bank, said it will hold, transfer and issue bitcoin and other crypto on behalf of its asset-management clients. The bank will begin offering these services later this year. Because they are a state-chartered bank, they can do this in NY without a BitLicense. (WSJ, Coindesk)

Mastercard is planning to support crypto natively on its network. However, it’s only going to support cryptocurrencies that meet certain requirements—including stability, privacy and compliance with anti-money laundering laws. The problem is that no cryptocurrencies meet Mastercard’s criteria. (Arstechnica, Mastercard announcement)

BitPay’s bitcoin cards can be added to Apple Wallet, giving crypto holders a new way to spend via Apple Pay. BitPay converts your bitcoin to cash, so it’s no different than selling your BTC first, and merchants won’t know the difference. (Business Insider)

This Valentines Day, consider giving that special someone a CryptoFlower! It will only set you back 4 ETH ($7,200). Each flower is genetically unique and immutable. And they don’t need water or sunlight because they live on the Ethereum blockchain. (FT)

Last but not least, the CBC QuadrigaCX documentary is coming soon! It was nearly a year ago that David Gerard and I met in Vancouver for the filming. It was also one of the last times I enjoyed a meal inside a restaurant sitting next to people.

*Update, Feb. 14—Someone on Reddit was giving me a hard time, arguing that I can’t say Cotten pulled off an exit scam unless I explain that he might actually be dead. I won’t believe he is dead until someone exhumes the body and proves it’s him. See my Quadriga timeline for details.

**Update, Feb. 15—The unidentified tether customer in Luca Land’s diagram turns out to be FTX.

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