North Korea (DPRK) is increasingly using cryptocurrency to avoid sanctions imposed by the US. To this conclusion came two experts from Washington, which was quoted by the news publication Asia Times.
Media experts — independent financial analyst and investigator for financial crimes Lourdes Miranda (Miranda Lourdes) and a lawyer working with cases of money laundering, Ross Delston (Ross Has), to assist in its own investigation on the application by the authorities of North Korea cryptocurrency.
Both experts claim that the government has successfully used the cryptocurrency for their own purposes and even trying to create their own, despite all the existing restrictions.
“International criminals everywhere prefer to use cryptocurrencies, and North Korea is no exception”, — spoke rather sharply, experts, — “crypto-currencies provide the DPRK with more opportunities to circumvent U.S. sanctions. They can do this through numerous international kryptomere, mixing and changing services. That looks like a typical money laundering”.
In the investigation, analysts describe the scheme by which the government of North Korea. The authorities hire people abroad, personally identifiable information (PII) which allows them to open cryptocurrency wallets, and apply them to currency trading. Local miners, in turn, send the cryptocurrency in these European purses with multipoles, where it is exchanged and mixed, to confuse the procedures for combating money laundering and KYC-procedures. Then these same funds in bitcoin becomes the representative of North Korea, after which the bitcoins are converted into other currencies to break up the linear nature of the transaction. Further, the DPRK government can transfer the cryptocurrency into Fiat and thus to obtain us dollars without any sanctions.
Recall that U.S. sanctions has become a reason for experiments in different countries with cryptocurrency. For example, the creation of Venezuela’s state cryptocurrency Petro immediately recognized as an attempt to circumvent U.S. sanctions. In response, the tramp in March, imposed new sanctions against Venezuela, but that did not stop the country to continue to develop the digital currency and implement it in the work of state authorities.
Another country benefiting from the advantages of crypto-currencies to bypass the sanctions policy was Iran. On the issue of cryptocurrencies, the Iranian authorities officially announced in July.
