South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service discovers a series of suspicious transfers worth $1B following a recent probe.
Following the decline of Terraform Labs, South Korean financial authorities have started cracking down on crypto platforms.
By late July, the nation’s prosecutors had raided 15 exchanges and related offices for allegations involving LUNA’s crash. Moreover, Terra’s co-founder, Daniel Shin’s house, and seven exchanges related to Terraform Labs were raided, and many firm employees were added to South Korea’s no-fly list.
A few weeks ago, Korean authorities launched a probe investigating possible illegal crypto activities involving FX transactions worth approximately $3.4 billion made by Woori and Shinhan commercial banks.
The FSS claimed that between May 2021 and June 2022, suspicious transactions amounting to 1.6 Trillion won (1.2B USD) occurred across five branches of Woori bank. In a similar vein, overseas transactions worth 2.5 trillion won (1.9B USD) the authorities discovered across 11 branches of Shinhan bank. The FSS also urged other banks to report their foreign bank transfers by the end of July.
The FSS started making their first arrests of inquiry three days ago; three individuals were arrested on charges of operating crypto trading platforms without regulation, false information submission to banks, and setting up paper companies, among others.
In their latest update, the agency claims to have discovered even more suspicious transactions amounting to additional $1B funds from an unmentioned crypto exchange. Allegedly, the crypto exchange transferred the illegal funds overseas to the US, Japan, and China. The FSS believes that paper companies involved in illicit foreign currency trades made some of these transactions using crypto accounts.
