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Pastor sentenced to five years for aiding an illegal exchange of bitcoin

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A New Jersey pastor was sentenced to five years in prison after being convicted of Trying to help a bitcoin exchange escape the scrutiny of banks and regulators.

Trevon Gross, 47, was sentenced Monday by US District Judge Alison Nathan in Manhattan, reports Reuters. He was also fined $ 12,000.

The bitcoin exchange involved in the case was Coin.mx. In March 2016, it was reported that Gross, the former chairman of a federal credit union Jackson, NJ was charged with accepting $ 150,000 of bribes. de-vin from the credit union. the operators of Coin.mx.

According to court records, Gross allegedly conspired with Anthony Murgio, who operated Coin.mx, and Yuri Lebedev, the IT operations director of the stock exchange, to finance the stock market's operations. In November 2015, Murgio initially pleaded not guilty to money laundering in a Manhattan courtroom.

From October 2013 to July 2015, the illegal exchange of bitcoins has traded millions of dollars for bitcoins of US customers. Reports suggest that Murgio and others badly coded debit and credit card transactions, and then limited the amount of individual dollar transactions to trick banks into completing transactions.

Lebedev and Murgio also operated a prominent company to launder the product of the exchange, called the Collectables Club.

However, in order to escape the examination, Lebedev and Murgio took control of the credit cooperative by providing Gross with bribes.

Apart from that, Coin.mx was also linked to a security breach at JPMorgan, which took place in 2014 and exposed the accounts of 100 million people. The result of this led to charges against nine people. Murgio, Lebedev and Gross have not been charged with hacking, but Gary Shalon, who owned Coin.mx, reportedly was behind the hacking.

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According to Reuters, Shalon, along with Joshua Samuel Aaron, embarked on cyberattacks that resulted in the theft of information from 100 million people. Prosecutors say the two have done the hacks to support other projects with Ziv Orenstein. These included increasing share prices with promotional emails.

Shalon, Aaron and Orenstein pleaded not guilty to criminal charges.

Accused of working through a front called Collectables Club, Lebedev was sentenced to 16 months at the end of October. In January, Murgio pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five and a half years in June. Gross's sentence to five years in prison is the latest in the Coin.mx scandal

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