The Hong Kong police have arrested a man suspected in a bitcoin investment scam involving almost $500,000, the South China Morning Post reports.
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The victims, who work at Tsim Sha Tsui currency exchange, reportedly wanted to invest $500,000 in bitcoin (EXANTE: Bitcoin) though a private meeting with a broker at an unnamed shop along the King's Road. However, the victims got suspicious on the handling of the transaction.
"The money was counted in the shop, before one of the two ‘sellers’ left the shop with the money to carry out some document procedure," a person familiar with the matter said.
Once the victims realized they were at the center of the fraud, they detained one of the middlemen. However, the other middlemen managed to escape with $500,000 in cash. The scam incident took place amid news that Hong Kong aims to tighten cryptocurrency trading for retail investors later this year.
The regulatory rules proposed by Hong Kong's Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau (FSTB) could encourage not only financial crimes, but also trigger retail investors' outflow onto the gray digital platform, warns the industry body Global Digital Finance (GDF) which represents such cryptocurrency exchanges as Coinbase, Huobi, BitMEX, and OKCoin.
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