US federal court sends Danvers Bitcoin exchanger to prison for laundering over $1m

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When Bitcoin Dreams Go to Jail: The Tale of Trung Nguyen

In the quaint town of Danvers, where the air is thick with the scent of ambition and a hint of mischief, a man named Trung Nguyen, or as he fancifully dubbed himself, “DCS420,” found himself in a pickle. Not the kind you find in a jar, mind you, but a legal one. Convicted and sentenced, he was, for running a Bitcoin operation that was as unregistered as a cat at a dog show. 🐱🐶

On a fateful Friday, the gavel came down, and Trung was sentenced to six long years in the clink. That’s right, folks, six years for turning over a million bucks in cash—cash that had a rather unsavory connection to scammers and a drug dealer. Who knew Bitcoin could lead to such a tangled web of trouble? 💰

From 2017 to 2020, Trung operated a little venture called National Vending. Now, you might think of vending machines dispensing snacks, but Trung had a different menu: cash for Bitcoin, served with a side of federal law violations. He didn’t bother to register with FinCEN, which is like trying to run a restaurant without a health inspection. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well.

Prosecutors painted a picture of Trung as a crafty operator, disguising his Bitcoin business as a vending machine enterprise. He even used encrypted messaging to keep his transactions as elusive as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. 🐾

“He [Nguyen] used encrypted messaging apps to communicate with customers, using technologies that made it more difficult to trace Bitcoin transactions and breaking cash deposits of more than $10,000 into smaller cash deposits over consecutive days or at different branches of the same bank.”

— U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Massachusetts

And just when you thought the crypto world couldn’t get any wilder, along came Alex Mashinsky, the founder of the now-defunct Celsius Network. He was sentenced to 12 years for his role in a financial fiasco that left users in the lurch, losing billions. It seems the crypto rollercoaster has no brakes! 🎢

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2025-05-23 12:34