This story was originally published on MyNorthwest.com. The City of Spokane is banning all cryptocurrency kiosks in the city in response to the surge of crypto scams from the machines which netted more than $141 million in losses in Washington in 2023. Additionally, the FBI reported nearly $5.6 billion in nationwide losses due to cryptocurrency
For months, two cryptocurrency investors pressured their longtime friend to hand over his electronic devices and the passkey to a crypto account worth millions of dollars, according to prosecutors and an internal police report. The investors, John Woeltz and William Duplessie, asked the man to meet three different times. At the first meeting, outside Manhattan,
This was raw, gangland violence — adjacent to Little Italy, no less — playing out against the purported and inscrutable sophistication of the cryptocurrency markets. Increasingly, it seemed, the “Matrix”-y, clean-room culture of digital finance was falling prey to a lurid, visceral, old-fashioned style of criminality. In recent months, the French have witnessed a series
Senate Democrats are demanding changes to cryptocurrency legislation pending in Congress, responding partly to growing evidence that the Trump family is using its connections and President Trump’s power to profit from crypto trading. The pushback intensified late last week after a closed-door meeting among Senate Democrats in which Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, told
French prosecutors said on Monday that the police had arrested seven people over the weekend in connection with the kidnapping of the father of a cryptocurrency entrepreneur, adding that the captive had been freed. In a statement, the Paris prosecutor’s office said it had been informed on Thursday that a man had been kidnapped in
The pitch from “ZMoney” arrived on the encrypted messaging app Signal just days before Donald J. Trump’s presidential inauguration. “ZMoney” was Zachary Folkman, an entrepreneur who once ran a company called Date Hotter Girls and was now representing World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency firm that Mr. Trump and his sons had recently unveiled. Mr. Folkman
Last month, Paolo Ardoino, the chief executive of the cryptocurrency company Tether, joined business executives and U.S. lawmakers for a private lunch at the Willard, a luxury hotel near the White House. For years, Tether had faced accusations that it lied about its finances and allowed crime to flourish on its platform. But at the
A quiet honor student who had recently graduated from Immaculate High School in Danbury, Veer Chetal was about to begin studying at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 2022, he completed a “future lawyers” program, and a story that year on the Immaculate website showed a photo of a smiling kid with glasses wearing a
At the end of a three-hour hearing last month, Senator Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona, sided with a group of Republicans in a hotly contested debate. He voted to advance the GENIUS Act, a bill backed by the cryptocurrency industry. “It’s clear that digital assets are here to stay,” Mr. Gallego said after the Senate
THE MYSTERIOUS MR. NAKAMOTO: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto, by Benjamin Wallace A few years ago, I met up for coffee in Miami Beach with a person named Keith Rabois. Along with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Rabois is a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia — the group that