The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is naming four crypto crimes to its top 10 scams 2023 list in an effort to raise consumer awareness.
Scams in crypto come hard and fast.
In honor of this, the IRS recently published a ranking of the ten most prominent and high-profile investigations in 2023, with four of the ten most high-profile cases involving cryptocurrency.
“Our investigators took down international tax schemes that preyed on people’s personal information, investigated multi-level marketing schemes involving cryptocurrency and uncovered one of the largest fraud schemes in history centered around renewable fuel credits.”
Jim Lee, IRS Criminal Investigation Chief
In first place was a businessman sentenced to prison for a billion-dollar biofuel tax fraud, while second place went to a former financial director of a Russian gas company, who was sentenced to more than 7 years in prison for tax crimes and evading sanctions.
No to be outdone, crypto made its entry at number three on the IRS list, in reference to the case of the OneCoin cryptocurrency pyramid scheme. In September, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams sentenced one of the project’s co-founders, Karl Sebastian Greenwood, to 20 years in prison.
According to Williams, Greenwood, along with his accomplice Ruja Ignatova, who remains at large, billed itself as “the next investment opportunity that cannot be missed.” At the same time, “Crypto Queen” Ruja Ignatova, who was involved in the OneCoin fraud, a crime that remains unpunished.
A New Hampshire resident ranked No. 4 on the list for running a scheme to launder more than $10 million in Bitcoin.
While in seventh place, a case of the Silk Road hacker who stole 50,000 Bitcoins (BTC) from the darknet site.
Eighth on this list is Oyster Protocol founder Amir Bruno Elmaani, who was sentenced to four years in prison for failing to pay $5.5 million in taxes. In April, he admitted to creating the Oyster Protocol scam and “secretly” issuing and selling Pearl tokens, deliberately integrating the “flawed” function of giving Pearl tokens into the project’s smart contracts.
Between October 2022 and September 2023, almost 50% of the agency’s cases involved crypto asset tax evasion. Various cases fall under this category. In particular, these are traders who hide capital gains.
Amid the growing threat, the IRS has begun to develop new rules for the cryptocurrency sector. In September, it was revealed that IRS and the U.S. Department of the Treasury have proposed new guidelines detailing the reporting duties of crypto brokers.
