The whole thing sounds slightly implausible, my first question was "what inspired a retired policeman to start tracking down 'illegal bitcoin rings' ?". Sounds a bit unlikely.
And cryptocurrency has no explicit legal status in any country other than Germany, so the whole thing seems somewhat contrived at some level. At what level, and to what end, who knows.
Yeah, this definitely sounds like a fake news story to scare people. Reuters is owned by the Rothschilds.
Not saying the whole thing is fake, there's no evidence of that. But equally, there's sparse evidence of what did happen, as this operation was (ostensibly) incredibly small.
I'd highlight the politicised aspect again also: any attempt to prosecute this apparent operation under French law should not be significantly different to Mt Gox's own legal case in France, where they too were running an unlicensed exchange (despite the fact that no license for cryptocurrency even exists to obtain, perhaps that's how Gox won the case). In fact, Mt Gox didn't have a license anywhere AFAIK, and they were permitted to operate for almost 4 years, transmitting and exchanging billions of dollars on an international scale. And they still won their French case.
So this event is certainly not especially newsworthy, ostensibly there wasn't alot of money involved (compared to Mt Gox). I'd guess that other unlicensed financial services of all types are busted frequently without making the news, let alone an international reportage service like Reuters. So why are a couple of off-beat guys from the French riviera, running a bitcoin exchange service out of their garage, getting very publicly arrested for it? And being reported on by "authoritative" international news services, and seemingly nowhere else yet?
Reeks of some kind of manipulation, but it's difficult to tell quite what the purpose is.
