Uncovering the Real Cartel in Bitcoin
(This is a copy-paste of two sections of a much longer post, originally posted in full by CryptoMedication, which link Bitfinex with Colombian drug cartels. Omitted are sections of already widely known facts about Tether and its fractional-reserve banking, and potential links to certain individuals and other exchanges. The reason for omitting them is to put focus on these two important “revelations,” which otherwise get buried, missed and ignored in a very long article. Link to the full text: https://medium.com/cryptomedication/uncovering-the-real-cartel-in-bitcoin-65b56a7a00a2)
Revelation IV — The Biggest Mistake Bitfinex+Tether Ever Made Was Asking Customers to Deposit Euros to a Shell Bank Account
This crucial mistake is what has allowed journalists like myself to venture all the way through to the furthest depths of this rabbit hole.
This article here is very important —
This article was written in November of 2017. It didn’t get too much attention at that point in time, but it is deadly important right now, in my opinionl for a few reasons.
The headline of this article is “Bitfinex Reveals a New Polish Bank Account Under a Panama Registered Company”.
(trust me this is important as FUCK).
Now, this article was released at a time when there was great speculation about Bitfinex’s banking because Wells Fargo had dissolved their relationship with them around mid-2017, which we went into-depth about above.
This statement in the article is the most important one, in my opinion.
It says,
“Bitcoin’s biggest exchange, Bitfinex, which currently handles around half a billion in bitcoin trading volumes, has launched a euro trading pair after seemingly securing a bank account with Bank Spoldzielczy w Skierniewicach which translates to Cooperative Bank in Skierniewice.”
This will be critical to the underpinning of this entire story and displaying how certain characters here are connected.
Above is a screenshot from that article, which shows the bank details for this shell bank account.
We see that the account that Bitfinex was trying to receive payments to was called, ‘CRYPTO SP. ZO.O.O’ .
This bank account was also related to the Cex.io exchange as well.
For those that are curious, I went ahead and purchased all of the company information from a Polish site that aggregates information on public companies (this a registered LLC there).
Here it is for those that want to actually look through this information themselves instead of reading screenshots:
The information is also available here as well (It’s in Polish, so Google Translate is your friend): http://www.krs-online.com.pl/msig-5075-310698.html
Since There’s a Lot of Information to Parse Through, I Isolated the Items That I Believe Deserve the Most Attention Here
From this above screenshot we can see Ivan Manuel Molina Lee is at the head of this Crypto SP ZO O company (SP ZO O = LLC in Polish).
We also see that Crypto Capital Corp. owns 99% of the company and that they acquired this at a value of PLN 4,950.00.
PLN=Polish Currency
So, based on the currency exchange rate at the time of writing (and you can see from the chart to the right this has been pretty consistent for years), 99% of this company was bought for $1,368.87, which is roughly the value of a 12-year old’s lemonade stand during a summer drought.
So, this company is based in a small, rural village with a population of about 15,000 people somewhere in Poland with an estimated total value of approximately $1,400 dollars and is owned by a Panamanian guy with Canadian citizenship that owns a slew of other shell companies.
And this is what Bitfinex, one of the world’s LARGEST crypto exchanges with a daily transaction volume of billions, was directing customers to.
So, Let’s Recap:
a. We know that Bitfinex has a bank account they were directing customers to in Poland.
b. We know that the bank account is under a shell company called ‘CRYPTO SP. ZO.O.O’ (or some slightly different variant with the period in a different place)
c. We know that this bank was erected specifically for the purposes of the EURO-traded pair.
d. We know that Ivan Manuel Molina Lee is the owner of this shell company and of Crypto Capital Corp. and Crypto Capital Corp holds a 99% stake of Crypto SP ZO O. So, essentially Crypto SP ZO O = Crypto Capital Corp (but not vice versa, this isn’t transformative like math).
e. There is virtually zero information on either company or the people running these companies except for the fact that they own a slew of other shell companies.
f. People/exchanges/entities rarely use shell companies for legitimate purposes. And by rarely, I mean almost never.
Who the Hell is Crypto Capital Corp?
You know that company I keep saying owns 99% of Bitfinex’s shell account in Poland?
I checked out the https://cryptocapital.co website (This is the Crypto Capital Corp Company). If you visit that site and scroll down to the bottom, here’s what you’re going to see:
You can see Bitfinex is clearly listed as one of the only 5 exchanges that they work with. So is CEX, another company that was linked to this shell bank account in the Trustnodes article. So, that’s 2/5 companies that we’ve accurately linked to that shell bank account that just happen to be on CryptoCapital’s website.
Either that’s the craziest coincidence of all time, or we’ve uncovered an association that Bitfinex apparently wanted to obfuscate for some reason.
Edit/Update: Crypto SP ZO.O was founded in September of 2016. There are no financial records for the company as they have never filed any. They sold 99% of their shares to CryptoCapital for 9000 PLN, which amounts to roughly $1.7k. The town/area that the bank account is located in houses roughly 10k-15k people, which qualifies it as a meager village. This information was installed above within the article as well.
Revelation V — Bitfinex Very Well May Have Gotten Exposed For Money Laundering in a Recent Polish Raid
Remember that Polish raid information that came out recently in like April? Maybe not, because not many publications covered it for some reason
If you don’t, here’s the link: https://cointelegraph.com/news/unconfirmed-polish-prosecutors-seize-400-mln-amid-allegations-bitfinex-is-implicated-in-fraud
Now, I get it. You’ll see the “Unconfirmed” in the title and immediately your ‘This could be bullshit’ radars go off and rightfully so, but I think this story is strongly worth considering.
Now, this was actually something that was brought to my attention by a good friend of mine a couple of days before the story ever hit on CoinTelegraph (which was the only major news publication to even mention it. The rest just spoke on the aftermath of what was going on.)
A good friend of mine posted this tweet here:
Now, he mentions Bitfinex by name, but the article here does not (don’t worry, that doesn’t fuck this connection up. I will explain)
The article is written in Polish as well. To be completely honest with you, when this was first sent to me, I initially waived it off as something that could be bullshit or even fabricated entirely. People have crazy stories they make up in this community all the time, right?
Not the case with this one.
Now here’s a link to a very solid, thorough translation that someone did of this article:
Please read. This story won’t make sense if you don’t. This is not a ‘skim through and get the gist’ type of read either. It’s not long, it’s worth it though.
The source that initially curated the article is also a government-owned source. Here’s a Wikipedia entry on ‘tvp.info’:
“Just weeks after winning the 2015 parliamentary elections, the conservative Law and Justice party passed a media law in December 2015 giving the government direct control over public broadcasting. TVP info is criticized for strong pro-government bias.”
So, this isn’t some asshole in his Mom’s basement that’s reporting this out. This was the Polish government. I have yet to see any reports from the Polish government that have either refuted the claims within the report or even claimed that it was a product of sensationalism, exaggeration, etc. I underestimated or took this fact for granted upon the first read of that article because it was in Polish and I don’t speak that and the site looked kind of blah.
But, upon close inspection, it appears that the fears here were not unfounded.
Here’s some of the most pertinent information that is super fucking important to take away from this article:
a. “A billion PLN 270 million taken over in March by the CBSP prosecutor’s office is most likely the money belonging to Colombian drug cartels — according to informer tvp.info.
b. “It is known that the money was on the accounts of two companies from the vicinity of Pruszkow, owned by a Canadian-born Panamanian descent and a Colombian with Panama citizenship. One of these companies was a shareholder of an online cryptocurrency exchange office. Millions of such operations were to flow through a small cooperative bank in Lodz.
c. Later in the article it states, “While checking the connections of this company [the company that they described as a shareholder of an online cryptocurrency exchange office], investigators came across another company C. At its head stood a man with citizenship of Colombia and panama. This, in turn, the company was associated with a large online cantor exchange of cryptocurrencies.
d. “Investigators determined that both companies did not actually carry out any economic activity. They were created solely to share your [probably a mistranslation of ‘your’, I think they meant ‘their’] bank accounts with international criminal financial operations.
“Money probably comes from international drug trafficking, as well as giant deception [Hmm, Tether probably?]. They were deposited at a branch of one of the banks, on the accounts of two companies registered in Poland — the National Public Prosecutor’s Office informed.
So, you might be looking at all that, then thinking to yourself, “Well, there’s no mention of Bitfinex or Tether anywhere in here. How can we even connect the two?”
Let’s Do Some Deductive Reasoning Here. We Know That:
a. This couldn’t be just ‘any’ old exchange. The 400 mln Euros worth of cash they seized is well over half a billion. So, we know that this needs to be from something that’s big enough to handle the loss of such a great amount of money without being entirely insolvent. We haven’t seen any major insolvencies with exchanges occur, so we can automatically narrow our sights to those in the top 10 strictly.
b. The bank account was in Poland. We know for a fact that neither Bittrex, Binance, Kraken, Coinbase, OkEx, HitBTC, Cryptopia, or Poloniex have bank accounts in Poland. But we do know that Bitfinex does, this is an indisputable fact.
c. We know that this bank account, which we have indisputable proof of Bitfinex owning, is linked to the shell company CRYPTO SP ZO.O.O. Ironically, the name of the company tied to a ‘major online exchange’ started with the letter ‘C’.
d. Even though this is in Poland, the owner of the company was identified as an individual of Panamanian (from Panama) descent. Now, just for reference:
Now, we know that Ivan Manuel Molina Lee is a Panamanian citizen. We also know that:
I’m sure there’s a chance that you’re still skeptical. But ask yourself, ‘If this isn’t Bitfinex, then who is it?’
It can’t be nobody. We know it’s an exchange. We also know that every single fact that we learned about Bitfinex MONTHS ago, line up with the information in this case.
We also know a lot from the Medium user, ‘Untether’ as well (No, he is not Bitfinexed either- I’ve asked Bitfinexed directly if it was. Their writing styles are tremendously different as well).
Curiously, this article was written by them months ago in December 24th, 2017 :
I can assure you that this article did not influence my conclusions here, because I was blissfully unaware that this article even existed. And if I did know, I think I skimmed it once and didn’t give it to much credence. But now, I’m giving it a lot of credence, because the information appears to be very well supported at this point.
Take a look at this:
Originally published at medium.com on May 16, 2018.