Cryptocurrency in the official vision of China, it is a legal commodity, the people want to do whatever they want. However, cryptocurrency is naturally favored by criminals. After all, it is easy to circulate (only a few minutes from one end of the earth to the other), good anonymity (full address is a pile of numbers and letters), and easy to cash (OTC transactions), it is a perfect medium for money laundering.

Judicial case retrieval shows that from 2016 to now, there are 158 criminal cases involving cryptocurrency, including pyramid selling, fraud, drug trafficking, theft, and other crimes in China. Here, it should be noted that the conventional trading of cryptocurrency is 100% legal behavior. In 2013, China’s five ministries and commissions documents confirmed that cryptocurrency is a legal article. Since it is a legal item, there will be no problem in trading. Since then, many judicial decisions have confirmed this point.

What the OTC merchants do is to buy and sell cryptocurrency. They buy cryptocurrency with fiat money at a low price on the Internet, and then sell it at a high price for fiat money. What they earn is the price difference between them. Therefore, for over-the-counter merchants, most of these crimes have nothing to do with them.

Except one: the crime of concealing the proceeds of crime and the proceeds of crime.

In the retrieved cases, the person involved in the case basically committed this crime because of some improper behavior in the process of cryptocurrency trading. Therefore, over-the-counter merchants pay enough attention to this issue.

The key to distinguish crime is to know that it is the proceeds of crime and its income. That is to say, if you know that the money for buying money comes from crime and you do business with the other party, you will commit this crime.

It can be seen from this that for an over-the-counter trading merchant, if the price is too low, the handling fee is too high, helping people to save money in multiple accounts, and helping acquaintances to deposit large amounts of money from unknown sources, all belong to “knowing”. That is to say, as long as you do these things, you will be suspected of committing a crime, even if you don’t know the source of the money.

OTC merchants, if they come across someone to ask you to do such a thing, they can’t promise to do it no matter how high the bid is.