Belarusian Citizen Fined $1 Million For Illegal Digital Asset Trading

Key Points:

• A Belarusian citizen will be required to pay a sizable punishment for setting up an online cryptocurrency exchange without authorization.
• The department’s decision to confiscate half of his income is acceptable, given that the court could have ordered him to give up the entire amount.
• The trader acknowledged that his business was unlawful, but he disagreed with the harshness of the punishment and made the decision to appeal to the high court, which upheld the original judgment.

The appeal of a Belarusian against a lower court’s decision directing him to pay the state $2,700,000 Belarusian rubles (about $1 million) for illegally trading digital assets was denied by the Supreme Court of the Republic of Belarus.

Citizen A organized an illegal crypto trade in January 2021 using his Telegram account, which is forbidden by law. As a result of his illicit operations, he earned a profit of 5,400,000 rubles.

The third operational department of the administration quickly and accurately deciphered the complexities of the offender’s transactions and sent the information to the court, according to a post by the Belarusian Ministry of Taxes and Duties, which was cited by the cryptocurrency news outlet Bits.media. The administration received the information about this violator from the Internal Affairs Directorate of the Zavodskoy district of Minsk.

Given that the court could have forced him to part with the entire sum, the department’s choice to take half of his income is reasonable. The trader accepted that his operation was illegal, but he objected to the severity of the sentence and decided to complain to the high court, which supported the initial decision.

He did not dispute the very fact of illegal activity, but “I would like a smaller fine.”

An order issued by President Alexander Lukashenko and put into effect in 2018 allowed crypto-related operations such as mining and trading, so long as they are carried out by organizations established within the unique legal and tax framework of the Belarus Hi-Tech Park.

The government has targeted cryptocurrency-related illicit activities, nevertheless. The head of the Investigative Committee said in May of last year that law enforcement had been successful in seizing millions of dollars worth of digital assets linked to criminality.

President Alexander Lukashenko’s passport information was allegedly accessible to Belarusian hackers in September, enabling them to create a nonfungible token (NFT) using his passport information. A group of hacktivists known as the Belarusian Cyber Partisans was attempting to sell an NFT that purports to include the passport details of Alexander Lukashenko.

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Harold

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