U.S. prosecutors late last week charged a Florida man in connection with an illegal bitcoin exchange.
According to a report by Reuters, Ricardo Hill, 38, was arrested in Florida in October and charged with conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting firm. Hill is linked to an illegal bitcoin exchange owned by a person in Israel that is accused of hacks on JPMorgan Chase. The report noted Hill was released on a $75,000 bond after he appeared in court.
The report noted Hill is one of nine people who are facing charges as part of the hack of JPMorgan, which the bank disclosed in 2014. The records of more than 83 million accounts were compromised in that incident. Hill was the finance support manager and a business development consultant for Coin.mx, which is a bitcoin exchange that is unlicensed. Prosecutors contend Coin.mx was operated by Anthony Murgio of Florida and owned by Gery Shalon, the Israeli accused of being behind the JPMorgan hack and that of other companies.
This spring, according to indictment documents that were recently unsealed in the case of the hacks into financial services players, including JPMorgan, E*TRADE Financial, Scottrade Financial Services and Dow Jones, the three hackers that were involved in illegally intercepting information about stock prices linked to an illegal online gambling ring had a connection to bitcoin — potentially.
The link is a little circuitous since there was a bribery scheme in the mix, wrapped around some good, old-fashioned money laundering, which is, of course, how bitcoin comes into play.
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