A Massachusetts man was found guilty of money laundering charges Friday.
Federal prosecutors say Trung Nguyen, a 48-year-old Danvers man, converted over $1 million in cash into Bitcoin, including $250,000 on behalf of a man who identified himself as a methamphetamine dealer, and hundreds of thousands more for scammers.
Nguyen ran National Vending, LLC, from 2017 to 2020, purposely failing to register the company with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, prosecutors said.
“Nguyen accepted cash from customers and, in exchange for a fee, sent them Bitcoin in return,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Massachusetts said in a press release. “Exchangers of virtual currency, including Bitcoin exchangers, are money transmitters under federal law and are subject to federal anti-money laundering (AML) regulations.”
Nguyen was convicted on charges of conducting an unlicensed money transmitting business, concealment money laundering and money laundering.
“Money laundering is the lifeblood of a wide swath of criminal conduct,” Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy said in a statement. “This defendant’s ‘no questions asked’ money laundering operation allowed a known drug dealer to turn their dirty cash into more deadly meth to pump onto our streets and it allowed scammers to swindle vulnerable victims out of their hard-earned savings.”
In addition to the methamphetamine dealer, prosecutors say he took $325,000 from a romance scam victim from Kansas City, $60,000 from a romance scam victim from Glastonbury, Connecticut, and $60,000 from a romance scam victim from central Massachusetts.
Scammers tricked the victims into converting cash into Bitcoin to send overseas, prosecutors said.
Nguyen did not file currency transaction reports on the cash transactions of over $10,000, and he did not file any suspicious activity reports, according to authorities.
Prosecutors say Nguyen could face decades in prison and hundreds of thousands in fines. He is due to be sentenced Feb. 12.
