By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The operator of the OKX Cryptocurrency Exchange pleaded guilty on Monday to violating US money laundering laws and paid nearly $505 million in fines and forfeiture fees, the U.S. Department of Justice said .
Seychelles-based entity Aux Cayes Fintech Co has granted one count operating an unauthorized transmission business.
It went into appeal at a hearing in front of us district judge Katherine Polk Fila in Manhattan who had imposed a sentence.
OKX is the world’s fourth largest cryptocurrency spot exchange based on trust in traffic, liquidity, trading volume and legitimacy of reported trading volume, according to CoinMarketCap. Binance, Bibit and Coinbase are highly ranked.
Prosecutors said from 2018 to early 2024 OKX violated its own policy to enable US people to use its platform, promoting suspicious transactions and criminal proceeds of over $5 billion. It said it was used.
OKX has encouraged customers to trade more than $1 trillion overall, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in fees and profits, and to avoid banning trains, prosecutors said.
One employee allegedly told the customer that he was based in the United Arab Emirates and told him to use random numbers for identification purposes.
According to prosecutors, OKX has also been promoted in the United States, including sponsoring the Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan.
The guilty plea includes a $84.4 million fine plus a $420 million confiscation, which requires the external compliance consultant hired earlier last year until February 2027. OKX worked with the probe to receive the credit.
In a statement, Aux Cayes Fintech acknowledged inappropriate transactions by US customers, accusing it of a “legacy compliance gap.”
It also states that US customers are a small percentage of their overall customer base and are no longer on OKX’s platform.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel of New York, Editing by Anna Driver)