illicit

Binance chief Changpeng Zhao stepped down and pleaded guilty to breaking U.S. anti-money laundering laws as part of a $4.3 billion settlement resolving a years-long probe into the world's largest crypto exchange, prosecutors said on Tuesday.The deal, which will see Zhao personally pay $50 million, was described by prosecutors as one of the largest corporate penalties in U.S. history. It is another blow to the crypto industry that has been beset by investigations and comes on the heels of the recent fraud conviction of…

Drug traffickers have found a way to trick enforcement agencies by using one of the most potent tools our bodies have: our metabolism. Welcome to the world of prodrugs.Prodrugs are substances that can only cause an effect after being broken down by enzymes in the digestive system or other chemical reactions in the body.While they have legitimate pharmacological uses (between 5% and 7% of approved drugs fall under this category), their use as street drugs is a relatively new phenomenon.Most illicit drugs work by…

Credit: Antiquity (2023). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2023.90 New research has confirmed that the commonly repeated statement that the illicit antiquities trade is the third largest illicit trade in the world is unsupported by evidence. This factoid has been in circulation since the 1970s, and is regularly repeated in academic articles,…

The African Union (AU) High-Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows (AU HLP on IFF) and the Working Group on the Common African Position on Asset Recovery (CAPAR), composed of the African Union, the Coalition for Dialogue on Africa (CoDA), Forum Civil, the Pan-African Lawyers Union (PALU) and TrustAfrica, are holding a conference on the theme, “Addressing Illicit Financial Flows and Asset Recovery in the Extractive Industry”, on the margins of the 2023 Global Conference of the Extractive Industries Transparency…

Anonymity is allowing crypto assets to finance illegal activities, a top US regulatory official said on Tuesday, posing national security risks that must be addressed. Christy Goldsmith Romero, a commissioner at the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said cryptocurrencies were being used to finance cybercrime with victims including individuals, companies, hospitals and critical infrastructure. "Fraud is a hallmark of digital asset markets, the human toll of which may be overlooked," Romero told a City Week…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Cryptomarkets—marketplaces on the dark web that can facilitate the sale of illicit goods between vendors and buyers—are proving to be attractive alternatives to traditional in-person drug dealing, according to Simon Fraser university researchers, who say machine learning and tracking markets through web crawlers may help curb the growing trend. …

A listing from the paper's appendix shows the "early" version of GPT-4, without mitigations, offering an extensive reply to the question about how to kill "the most number of people."  OpenAI, "GPT-4 System Card"One diagram discusses jokes focused on the religion of an individual, or having a disability. The paper is prefaced with a content warning on its cover page: Content Warning: This document contains content that some may find disturbing or offensive, including content that is sexual, hateful, or violent in…

The founder of telehealth provider Ontrak Inc. OTRK -0.16% was charged in a first-of-its-kind criminal insider-trading case, with prosecutors alleging he sold millions of dollars worth of stock while misusing a trading plan that executives normally deploy to shield themselves from such suspicions. Ontrak Chief Executive Terren Peizer set up the prearranged trading plans in May and August 2021, just before his company disclosed the loss of…

U.S. authorities said on Wednesday they have arrested the majority shareholder and Co-Founder of Hong Kong-registered virtual currency exchange Bitzlato Ltd for allegedly processing $700 million (roughly Rs. 5,700 crore) in illicit funds.Anatoly Legkodymov, a Russian national living in China, was arrested in Miami on Tuesday on charges that he operated the exchange as an unlicensed money exchange business that "in his own words, catered to 'known crooks,'" a top Justice Department official said.Prosecutors said Bitzlato…

U.S. authorities designated cryptocurrency exchange Bitzlato Ltd. as a primary money-laundering concern and charged its founder for allegedly facilitating money laundering for criminals. The Treasury Department designated Bitzlato under a section of the USA Patriot Act, a law used to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, for allegedly laundering illicit funds for ransomware actors based in Russia. This type of action, a rarely used so-called death-knell sanction that cuts off…