ShapeShift disagrees with reports indicating that the $9 million laundered was transacted via its platform. The recent reports regarding the $9 million money laundering activity has caused a lot of speculations globally. ShapeShift is out there to guard its reputation. This exchange has denied claims that the transactions were conducted via its platform.
An article called “How Dirty Money Disappears Into the Black Hole of Cryptocurrency” has been making rounds lately. It was published on September 28.According to it, a sum of $88.6 million had been lost through fraudulent activities. According to it, these funds were moved through 46 cryptoexchanges. The article also specified that $9 million was transacted via ShapeShift’s platform.
WSJ is not leaving anything top chance. It downloaded a list of the 50 most recent transactions conducted after every 15 second in this exchange’s platform. It has stored them safely and will soon be undertaking its own analysis.
It seems like ShapeShift won’t be stopping until its clears its name. Erik Voorhees, ShapeShift’s founder and CEO has run to the defense of this exchange. According to this official, their team had spent almost five months working with WSJ journalists. He asserts that there have been a lot of pretenses. For instance, much of the information they provided was either omitted or misrepresented.
WSJ’s article outlined that bad actors had jumped in the scene eventually taking advantage the exchange’s user anonymity. According to it, the actors ended up converting Bitcoin into Monero which has become rather difficult to trace so far.
Voorhees insists that they have in place some internal anti-money laundering program which is rather sophisticated. According to him, it deploys top-notch blockchain forensics. These are quite advanced in nature. It is by far much more than simply asking for a given person’s name or even address.
Vorhees opined, “WSJ forewent a chance to prevent potential illicit activity in their reporting practices. The blog post reads that WSJ withheld gathered data on suspicious accounts in order to build their story.”
He believes that there were deliberate efforts by WSJ to ignore the suspicious activity instead of having reported them to the appropriate exchanges.
