Bitcoin Forum

We know that btc-e.com is a major bitcoin exchange and lots of fiat money is involved. The operator of this exchange themself are most likely evading tax.

I have nothing against btc-e.com.. In fact, I really like btce-com!

BUT, I am wondering, why is no authority chasing them? Obviously they are violating lots of USA and EU laws. Laws about money laundering, no ID verification, and more. Probably some people already tried unsuccessfuly to sue them.

They do use cloudflare.com as a CDN, which is a US-company, so at least the US-authorities could easily track ithem down, and find out where they are hosted, and by whom! We know about NSA, the snowden stories, that chasing them down by pressing just one button could easily be done.

They are even using google analytics on their site!!! So that means, a lot of data of their customers gets sent directly to NSA.
So my question is, WHY is no authority trying to find out who they are and shut the website down???

Is it because the operators dont have US-citizenship? Or because its not hosted on US soil? I am really wondering...

I've seen few posts that "few shady russians run it" but i know wich of this is true, and yes i have to dissappoint you, US laws don't apply to whole world, surprise?  ::)

their bank does require id

it is a russia based exchange that follow rules of russian govt only
and about US Laws, it didnot apply to whole world they are just US laws not universal laws

I haven't used btc-e.com but isn't it somewhat similar to localbitcoins.com?

That and the owners are allegedly anonymous. I'm not sure how they get away with that.

No, it's a normal exchange with BUY / SELL ORDERS etc. - you can cash out your Bitcoins to Fiat and buy Bitcoins with your Fiat. They are a little bit shady but in the business for years now!

How would one explain the sudden increase in US $$$ to the tax collectors??

No problem with btce so far. It is good trading site, at least, for myself.

Exactly how the IRS said to?
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-14-21.pdf

Ahh, so there'd be no problem, even with the allegations that the btc-e is a little shady? Iunno how in-depth the IRS would analyze everything

The IRS and FinCen are two separate entities.  Whether or not you are breaking any laws, and whether or not the IRS would even know and/or report that you are breaking any laws is completely separate from whether or not you are properly paying taxes on your income.  I have heard it suggested that the IRS doesn't care if your money came from drug deals as long as they get their cut, but I don't know whether or not that is true.  Moreover, as a layman, I can't really offer financial or legal advice, but the answer to that question (whether or not you are breaking any laws) might be in this document, and it might depend whether you are trading as an individual or a business:
http://www.fincen.gov/news_room/rp/rulings/pdf/FIN-2014-R001.pdf
I don't know whether or not what you are doing business as an individual or a company has any bearing on whether or not you can get in any trouble for doing business with a company that should be registered as an MSB, but that is a question for a lawyer.  However, the allegations in this thread don't lean toward money laundering, they lean toward tax evasion.  That having been said, I suppose can tell you that I am not aware of any laws that would require any bitcoin exchange to report anything to the IRS (I do know that securities brokers only recently had to start reporting the various types of securities over the last 3-5 years, and bitcoin isn't a security), so it may be that US citizens using BTC-E are in a position to evade taxes while BTC-E has nothing to do with it (IOW, perhaps the same US citizens could do the same thing on any other exchange, even if it was based on US soil).  Regardless, just because I am not aware of a law doesn't mean the law doesn't exist, so discussion with an accountant and/or lawyer may be a good idea here as well.

Well it's really weird mut maybe russian goverment just doesn't notice it? Lol.

They probably are looking at BTC-e & other trading sites, with online poker one day there was a problem out of the blue, the same might happen.  Or maybe they will all apply for a bit license.

As others have said, they can't invade or piss off countries like Russia and China, so if you're planning on pissing off the U.S that's the way to go usually, America likes to talk about how tough they are but when it comes to trying to take on a country that has an air force at it's disposal they back down immediately.

They blocked out russia for trading in recent months which seemed like a good move for the safety of ROW customer funds.

In case you have not noticed. Russia is a haven void of the US iron fist..for the most part.

Hackers stay away from btce b/c they dont want to fall in the meatwagon from the Russian bosses.

I've heard that owners of btc-e are Ukrainians, and developers are Russian. Not sure is it true, perhaps just a rumors

Investigations can take years.

Their location is actually only speculated to be in or around Russia (most speculation is that it is based in the Ukraine) because the time stamp on their servers matches that time zone.

In reality however, even their approximate location is not known as they use a number of identity masking services to hide their true identitys

Most likely they are in a country that is not on good terms with the USA, so the USA has no course to go after them and the country they are in has no laws for this, no way to enforce them or does not want to enforce them.

This is why. Since no one knows who their owners are or where they are based out of, no government is able to compel them to give up any information/assets.

there should be a class action suit against them

Then you are really naive, no offence. You misunderstand the role of those agencies.

The role of those spy agencies is not to catch criminals or make justice, but to oppress people and spy on innocents, like they do now.

i heard that btc-e.com is russia based and USA authorities can't do anything
they mostly do what is against usa, they support such stuff

Probably because no one really knows where they are from.
So you can't say they are something illegal if you don't know which laws apply to them.

Unless money laundry is actually explicitly illegal in the whole world. Don't think that's the case yet ;D

They are from russia, or atleast one of the main owners of it is from there. I just saw an article on coindesk that was talking about them.

I dont think russia has very strict laws about this. Especially now that the western world is banning eastern stuff, you can be sure that the russians will protect their own companies against western threats

It's the active trollbox: Even the strongest authorities are afraid to mess with the btc-e trollbox.  :D

Maybe Russia is less strict when it comes to AML/KYC, but Russians are not allowed to use Bitcoin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_bitcoin_by_country#Russia)


A UK company named Mayzus Financial Services Limited certainly knows who's behind BTC-e, since they are processing payments for them.

Yes it's all fun and all to bash the USA, (hahaha you have no power here yankees!) but I can guarantee shadow banking and money laundering is just as illegal in Russia or China as the US. But just like the US it's not what you did but who you know, pay off the right people and you can evade or delay prosecution for awhile.

Only thing to say is well played BTC-E!! Dodge the authorities and make a good name to have customers over years. Simply well played!

They are not "authorites" ,nobody gave them authority, they self proclaimed it, they are just a bunch of thieves trying to destroy a very competitive and pro-capitalist business with all their stupid rules and regulation.

Well yes. If you had the feeling of irony from my post it wasn't.As long as BTC-E works as it did till now I do applaud to them.

I can't believe you're happy that they are dodging the laws and remaining anonymous. Your praises will stop when you come upon an empty account and have noone to turn to. I hope it won't happen, but people actually start to like the law and authorities once they are in trouble.
I have nothing against Btc-e, but a bit of transparency never killed anyone.

+1 the Bitcoin economy could be much safer if they did basic identity checks like any other exchange.

BTC-E is the only exchange that I'll ever use. Their exchange is probably the most illegal, but its the only one that has been around as long as it has been. I was actually in the BTC-E chat the first and only time they got hacked, and they refunded everyone within a few hours. It was a pretty sizeable hack too, something like $40k USD, and BTC was around $10/coin at the time. About a year's worth of their service fees.

They even made me a custom chat gif for my birthday  ;D

I dont especially care that they aren't transparent as long as they work, I dont have enough fingers to count the "legit" exchanges that have popped up and run with people's money. I dont know if they are doing things legally in Russia, but by staying anonymous they have pretty successfully dodged US regulators.

Everybody should risk as much as they can affort to lose.No investment is 100% safe.

If you are afraid that they rob you a few coins, but you ignore the fact that the so called authorities rob 80% from you every month for the rest of your life is really ignorant.

You also don't like the "authorities" after they break into your house and machine-gun your dog like they do 99.9% of the time.

I have also enjoyed their sight a lot over the years. I hope they still have good volume in the future.  :)

The following countries could take action against BTC-e:

- the United States (taking their .com domain name, Cloudflare and GoDaddy)
- the United Kingdom (freezing funds of their payment provider)
- Australia / New Zealand (via Instra.com)
- Latvia (freezing the SEPA account of their payment provider)
- Hong Kong (freezing their Perfect Money funds)
- Russia (freezing their Yandex Money funds)
- their home country

Well if they following regulation am sure everything will be fine but then again if not then only time will tell if they are doing things within the legal limits or they are actually taking illegal action and not following rules and regulations but many use btc-e if governments where to act and stop them then it would be another big exchange to leave and no doubt the down fall for BTC prices. But if that is not the case then what about coinbase that is in San Francisco, California surly with the rules and regulations in the US will get pulled apart but does coinbase follow rules regulation and regulated. Am sure I seen a new exchange popup that was meant to be supported by the government but so far as yet to see results.

They don't.

I would not like to see that though, the price is already dangerously too low, and we dont want bitcoin to die just now as many many retailers and people start to acknowledge it. So please let these exchanges continue atleast 3-4 more years until they diversify themselves so that bitcoin to have enough time to spread between people!

Well it is not under our control, that is down to the governments to proceed and to take action or not. I agree in what your saying too to not take control or suspend services but if the government want to close them down they will do. Could take a long time before action is taken. And indeed if it was to close and then price would tumble down just like when MTGOX went rouge price got hit hard and still recovering from that. And right now to get bitcoin back up into the nice 800s again is going to take a lot of work to succeed where it has faild.

There are always alternatives like localbitcoins.com but really stable exchanges are a fundation of a currency. So i really hope they wont fuck it up for atleast 2-3 more years until bitcoin will stabilize and start to grow. But yea nowadays few exchanges are complying with regulation so its probably more tolerated, but i really want atleast 2-3 more years tolerance and after that bitcoin will be undefeatable.

Indeed none do comply with rules and regulation and wonder later on why they get closed down. It would be insane to see btc-e get closed down at it would have some serious impact on BTC again. I doubt this will happen any time soon but they is always that possibility that it can happen if they do not follow rules. Only time will tell and if will be around for the future. Right now I tend not to have much on exchange sites if for any reason they run into problems as been hit by a few in the past that did have problems but luckily I did not have a lot of coin in them to be affected by them.

why should it do?
btc-e just do bitcoin business, which authority is care of it?