Brit Featherston, U.S. Attorney, said that a 33-year-old male and a 75-year-old woman had been accused in the Eastern District of Texas for their roles in a bitcoin laundering money scam.
In a federal criminal indictment, Manik Mehtani of McLean, Virginia, and Lois Boyd of Amelia Court House, Virginia, were charged with violating the money laundering conspiracy, money laundering, and Travel Act.
According to the complaint, Mehtani and Boyd are accused of conspiring with others to obtain victim money from a number of fraudulent transactions and launder the proceeds using cryptocurrencies.
Illegal Gain Sources
The suspects are accused of structuring deposits regularly to avoid transaction reporting obligations and hide the nature and source of illegal gains. The defendants are accused of exchanging illegal proceeds for cryptocurrencies and sending them to wallets controlled by their foreign co-conspirators. The defendants traveled to Longview, Texas, in August 2020 to try to swap more than $450,000 in cash for Bitcoin. Instead, they were imprisoned for a short time, and the money was taken. Boyd, Mehtani, and other co-conspirators are accused of laundering more than $750,000.00 during their operation.
Boyd and Mehtani may face up to 20 years in jail if convicted. However, an indictment by a jury trial is not proof of guilt.
Bound By-Laws
Until confirmed guilty of a crime in a court of law, an accused is presumed innocent.
This is part of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) investigation. OCDETF uses a prosecuting attorney, intelligence-driven, multi-agency approach for identifying, disrupting, and destroying the highest-level criminal organizations that threaten national security to the United States.
