A 31-year-old man from Groningen is facing an 80-hour community service for laundering money in his business via a bitcoin ATM. The entrepreneur had a bitcoin ATM in his business from March 29, 2018 to January 31, 2019. That reports RTV North.
The judge tells the judge that he didn't really know how the device worked. On the advice of a visitor from Amsterdam, he decided to have the ATM placed in his shop. He received a small monthly fee.
The prosecution blames the Groninger for not knowing that there was undeclared money in the machine. The district attorney's office deems him an accessory to money laundering. In addition to community service, a suspended prison sentence of six months has also been demanded against the entrepreneur.
Bitcoin ATM
A bitcoin ATM, or ATM, works quite easily: you can buy BTC with cash (euros, dollars). The operators charge a fee and often pay a small amount to the owner of the property where the hardware is located.
Even at these kinds of outlets you have to legitimize yourself in the Netherlands nowadays. You should think of, for example, a fingerprint scan or showing your ID card/passport. Some operators make an exception for small amounts.
Identify
However, you can bypass the identification settings etc. Users were able to deposit money anonymously and paid 5 percent on the entire amount for exchanging their euro for BTC. That percentage is often (certainly for larger amounts) much lower.
So it looks like a piece of 'service': you remain anonymous, but you have to pay a higher amount.
Undercover agent
An undercover agent was deployed to find out what the entrepreneur had to do with the machine. On the officer, the defendant makes a remarkable statement to the judge: ''I thought it was a prostitute.''
The agent exchanged 1,200 euros. Above the limit of 1,000 euros, an ID check is automatically carried out, and that limit is now a lot lower.
The man from Groningen came to the rescue: he offered to split the sums in two in order to bypass the controls. After that, two more such transactions were made. Those last two transactions took place outside the store's opening hours.
According to RTV Noord, the suspect states: ''I thought it was a prostitute and thought it would be safer for her if no one else was in the store.'' The D.A. doesn't believe any of this story and therefore considers the entrepreneur to be complicit in money laundering.
The story is also not very convincing, because the agent also hinted that it was money from the sale of weed. And that is still a grey (or illegal) area in the Netherlands.
These were not the only transactions that circumvented the controls in this way, with which the shopkeeper played into money laundering. According to the prosecutor, De Groninger played only a small role, enabling criminals to launder money into a 'legitimate means of payment'.
In two weeks, the 38-year-old man will hear the judge's ruling.