Bitcoin mixer Helix Pleads Guilty For $300M Money Laundering

A bitcoin mixture was involved in huge numbers of money laundering Bitcoin mixing transactions. The owner of the mixer pleads Guilty.

Because of the anonymous feature of crypto assets, few people are using it for illegal activities. But as we know, buying and selling crypto assets through fiat currency leads to a breach in the privacy of the crypto trader. So to overcome this privacy breach, lots of services are running in the online crypto market which provides a facility to exchange the crypto assets so that no one can trace them. These services are known as crypto mixture services. 

Helix is a bitcoin-mixing service which operates their services in the Darknet world of the Internet. The owner of the Helix, Larry Harmon, arrested by the police of the U.S. 

38-year-old Ohio resident Larry Harmon denied any type of allegation of money laundering against himself through his lawyer. His lawyer said that Bitcoin is not a money so how can the court consider it a money laundering case for him because he only exchanges bitcoin ( not with fiat). 

But the court rejected the point of the defense lawyer and said that Bitcoin is a mode of payment and Harmon was involved in money laundering activity indirectly even though he was aware of it.

Now, Harmon plead guilty to fascilitate more than 1.2 million bitcoin transactions which was involved in many type of illegal activities like drug dealers, fraudsters, and neo-Nazi groups. 

Allegedly, he did $300 million worth of Bitcoin transactions from June 6, 2014, to Dec. 16, 2017. 

The Department of the Treasury of the U.S authority fined Harmon $60 million by October. The whole punishment yet to be decide by the court that for how long he will be sentenced to jail.

Read also: El Salvador’s Bitcoin banking regulations draft paper released