Collecting money with digital currencies has 10 years in prison!
Chinese authorities have recently introduced changes to the country’s laws that criminalize individuals or groups that use digital currency sales to raise the capital needed for their business and could face more than 10 years in prison.
To Report Bloomberg, China has recently changed its penal code to include the issue of money laundering offenses with digital currencies. These laws will give the authorities more power to completely eradicate the field of digital currencies, which they outlawed last year, using heavy penalties for violators in their own country.
China’s Supreme Court on Thursday issued the latest provisions of its criminal law on illegal fundraising. The amendment, for the first time, addresses the sale of digital currencies as one of the illegal ways to raise capital in China.
Under the amendment, a person found guilty of illegally collecting money could face up to 10 years in prison. However, the Supreme Court of China has not determined whether digital currency will be treated differently from other methods of illegal fundraising at the time of sentencing.
While China banned the use of digital currency (ICOs) in 2017 for projects operating in the country, local courts have not yet had a clear legal framework for those who do not. Meanwhile, government bans on digital currencies in China have accelerated; The move culminated last year with a total ban on digital currency transactions.
“Winston Ma, a professor at New York University School of Law, said:
This is the first legal provision of the Supreme Court that formally covers digital currency transactions under criminal law.
The inclusion of such provisions in criminal law will turn China, once the hub of the digital currency industry, into a graveyard of digital currencies.
China banned bitcoin in 2013, then continued to crack down on it, forcing miners and digital currency exchanges to move en masse to areas such as Hong Kong and Singapore. At the same time, it is one of the largest economies that has acted much earlier in adopting national digital currencies. China has previously used digital yuan for payments during the Winter Olympics.