US no longer enforcing cryptocurrency fraud

[bruncher]

In a memo sent to the Justice Department on Monday night, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department will largely stop bringing cases that violate the Bank Secrecy Act or contain unregistered broker dealer violations, instead focusing on crimes that people commit with cryptocurrency, such as illicit drugs and human trafficking.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... forcement/

[Urbandreamer]

The Washington Post article is behind a paywall.

Here is a link to ABC news reporting on the same thing.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-a ... =120589406

bruncher never gave their opinion, so I won't either.

Except to state that ABC don't seem to have the same slant as the Washington post.

i.e

The Justice Department instructed federal prosecutors to "no longer target virtual currency exchanges, mixing and tumbling services, and offline wallets for the acts of their end users or unwitting violations of regulations," according to a memo from the U.S. deputy attorney general reviewed by ABC News.

"The Department of Justice is not a digital assets regulator," the memo said. "The National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) shall be disbanded effective immediately."

[Urbandreamer]

Hummm.

I wonder if I'm not opening a can of worms here, but...

The memo issued by the Department of Justice seems to relate to the Samourai Wallet court case and the Tornado cash mixer case.

There have been developments in the Samourai case.
It would seem that the prosecutes were aware that the regulator responsible felt that there was no need for Samourai to apply for a money transmitter license as such a license would not apply to them. Further, despite the Judge requiring the prosecutors to pass such information on, they didn't.

Technically had it been discovered after the court case the prosecutors would have been clearly VERY much in the wrong.

In the Tornado cash case the judge decided that the opinions of the regulator didn't matter and chose not to consult them. However IF the prosecutes were aware of the regulators opinion, that clearly will be a Brady violation. I'm sure that questions will be asked.

Here is what was argued today.
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/05 ... -violation

It's also of note that such cases could cause precedent. In effect the law relating to what is or is not a money transmitter in the US would change without democratic debate.