Crypto exchange BitMex is facing another RICO lawsuit in California. The founders are accused of intentionally designing BitMEX “from the ground up with the purpose to engage in, facilitate, aid, abet, counsel, induce and/or procure numerous of illegal activities”.
Accused of market manipulation
The lawsuit is filed by Anatoly Sorokin, who is represented by Pavel Pogodin, the same attorney who filed the last civil RICO lawsuits against BitMEX and its staff. The illegal activities they are accused of include the intentional evasion of mandatory financial controls, including failing to implement any KYC or AML checks, and often willful allowing market manipulators and money launderers on the exchange.
This implies that BitMEX would “intentionally take the BitMEX platform offline during market manipulation to generate losses for retail traders active on the platform.
New information puts the lawsuit in a different light
Information gathered in the previous lawsuit is also being used against BitMEX in this lawsuit. Attempts to close the case based on the fact that U.S. customers were prohibited from using the platform are being thrown off the table after Pogodin discovered that BitMEX’s top three leaderboard traders were all U.S. citizens who generated over $100,000,000 in trading profits for BitMEX alone.
The lawsuit is just the latest filed by former BitMEX users, and it won’t be the last. In addition to the pending civil lawsuits, the defendant founders- Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo and Samuel Reed -are now set to go to trial in March 2022 in the federal criminal case against them, according to a court filing on Tuesday.
Source: Cryptonary
