A Santa Monica man charged with utilizing his cryptocurrency money alternate enterprise to launder thousands and thousands of {dollars} in alleged prison proceeds will plead guilty on Sept. 27 to a federal cost, officers mentioned Tuesday.
Charles Randol, 33, has agreed to plead guilty to failure to keep an efficient anti-money laundering program, against the law that carries a sentence of up to 5 years in federal jail, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
He’s anticipated to enter his plea earlier than U.S. District Choose Hernán D. Vera in downtown Los Angeles.
From October 2017 to July 2021, Randol owned and operated a virtual-currency cash providers enterprise often known as Digital Coin Methods LLC. The corporate provided cryptocurrency money alternate providers for a fee, in accordance to his plea settlement.
Randol met nameless clients in particular person to full transactions, controlling and working a community of automated kiosks in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties that transformed money to Bitcoin and vice versa, and performed Bitcoin-for-cash transactions for unknown individuals who mailed giant quantities of U.S. foreign money to him, together with to submit workplace containers that he managed, courtroom papers present.
Randol admitted in his plea settlement to repeatedly violating federal regulation and his firm’s personal insurance policies by facilitating suspicious foreign money alternate transactions and taking steps to conceal them from regulation enforcement.
For instance, Randol steadily performed in-person money transactions that exceeded $10,000 with nameless or pseudo-anonymous people, together with individuals whom Randol knew solely by such monikers as Puppet Shariff, White Jetta, Yogurt Monster and Hood.
In his plea settlement, Randol admitted to participating in particular transactions from October 2020 to January 2021 in which he exchanged a complete of $273,940 in money for Bitcoin with out requesting a reputation, proof of id, Social Safety quantity or another details about the client or the supply of the funds being exchanged — violations of the Financial institution Secrecy Act.
Randol additionally allowed criminals to construction and launder funds by his Bitcoin kiosks in malls, fuel stations and comfort shops in Los Angeles, Glendale, Santa Clarita, Huntington Seaside, Santa Ana and Riverside, prosecutors allege.