By Jonathan Stempel
THE operator of the OKX cryptocurrency exchange has pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-money laundering laws and will pay nearly $505 million in fines and forfeited fees, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
Aux Cayes FinTech Co, a Seychelles-based entity, admitted to one count of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business.
It entered its plea at a hearing before U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla in Manhattan, who imposed the sentence.
OKX is the world’s fourth-ranked cryptocurrency spot exchange based on traffic, liquidity, trading volumes, and confidence in the legitimacy of reported trading volumes, according to CoinMarketCap. Binance, Bybit and Coinbase rank higher.
Prosecutors said that from 2018 through early 2024, OKX contravened its own policy against letting people in the United States use its platform, and was used to facilitate more than $5 billion of suspicious transactions and criminal proceeds.
OKX let U.S. customers conduct more than $1 trillion of transactions overall, generating hundreds of millions of dollars of fees and profits, and sometimes encouraged customers to skirt the train ban, prosecutors said.
One employee allegedly told a customer to say it was based in the United Arab Emirates and to use random numbers for identification purposes.
OKX also promoted itself in the United States, including by sponsoring the Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan, prosecutors said.
OKX penalty
The guilty plea includes an $84.4 million fine plus a $420.3 million forfeiture, and requires OKX to employ through February 2027 an external compliance consultant it hired early last year. OKX received credit for cooperating with the probe.
In a statement, Aux Cayes FinTech acknowledged the improper trading by U.S. customers, attributing them to “legacy compliance gaps.”
It also said the U.S. customers were a only small percentage of its overall customer base, and are no longer on OKX’s platform.
David Meister, outside counsel for OKX, added: “[The] settlement contained absolutely no charges of money laundering — Aux Cayes FinTech, one of many OKX affiliates, resolved a investigation by acknowledging that it had not obtained a license to operate as a money transmitter.”
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