Netherlands’ Strong Regulations on Crypto: A Man Arrested for Scam

• A thirty-nine-year-old man was arrested by the Dutch police for laundering money via cryptocurrency.
• He accumulated the Bitcoins through the fake Electrum wallet.
• The collected Bitcoins were changed to Monero using Bisq exchange.

The Dutch cybercrime team arrested a thirty-nine-year-old man from Veenendaal, a town in the central Netherlands, for allegedly laundering money through cryptocurrency worth 10 million euros.

On September 13, 2022, the Dutch police released a statement regarding the arrest of the man.

In the statement, the police updated that the man, to conceal his crime, converted the stolen Bitcoin into Monero, through the exchange Bisq, a decentralized Bitcoin exchange network. The police added that the same Electrum wallet, by which the man amassed his digital assets, helped them track him.

As the man converted the Bitcoins to Monero, he used a public distributor ledger with privacy-enhancing technologies. Therefore, it was much more difficult for the cyber team to trace the fraudulent transactions.

As a part of the investigation, the police searched the house of the accused and were successful in identifying solid evidence for his crime. The police stated that:

The police investigation continues, including into the digital means of payment that the man possesses and the data carriers. The expected profit that the man would have made in the money laundering, the police were able to confiscate in the form of cryptocurrencies.

Though the accused was sent back home after the arrest, he still remains a suspect. The Netherlands had strong regulations on crypto. With the introduction of the Dutch Implementation Act, holding anti-money laundering rules, the country had been actively regulating the crypto space, blocking any possible fraudulent activities.