US, UK, Canada, Australia, Netherlands Crypto Data Reveals a Possible $1B Ponzi Scheme

Tax enforcement officials from the Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement (J5) countries met in London this week where representatives from the U.S., U.K., Australia and the Netherlands shared intelligence and data on illegal cross-border crypto activity.

During the meeting, more than 50 crypto-related criminal leads were identified, as reported by Bloomberg on Friday.

The general director of the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD), Niels Obbink, told the publication:

“NFTs are one of the new modern digital ways of trade-based money laundering.”

Obbink added that crypto has “less control and less supervision and a limited regulation that makes it vulnerable for fraud,” and therefore “it must have our attention.”

Jim Lee, the head of criminal investigations at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), noted:

“Some of these leads … involve individuals with significant NFT transactions revolving around potential tax or other financial crimes throughout our jurisdictions.”

Lee pointed to one lead in particular which “appears to be a $1 billion Ponzi scheme,” touching “every single J5 country.”

In addition, the J5 will soon be coming with announcements on “significant targets”, stemming from multiple leads involving decentralized exchanges and financial technology companies.

The J5 is comprised of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), the Fiscale Inlichtingen- en Opsporingsdienst (FIOD), HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI). The agency was created in an offensive move against enablers of tax crime following a call to action from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for do more to tackle the enablers of tax crime.