United States prosecutors have charged Charles O. Parks III with wire fraud and money laundering after he allegedly ran a “large-scale illegal ‘cryptojacking’ operation,” defrauding two cloud computing providers out of $3.5 million to mine $970,000 in cryptocurrencies such as ether, litecoin, and monero without authorization. Parks, who was arrested in Nebraska and faces up to 50 years in prison, allegedly created multiple fake accounts under the guise of various companies to gain heightened privileges and benefits from the cloud services, evading payment and inquiries about unusual data usage. The indictment details how Parks laundered the mined cryptocurrency through exchanges and a New York City-headquartered NFT marketplace, structuring payments to skirt federal reporting requirements, and used the ill-gotten gains for extravagant purchases.
Source: Bitcoin
