Romanian Exchange CEO Arrested, Faces Money Laundering Charges

Vlad Nistor, the CEO of Coinflux a Romania-based Bitcoin exchange platform has been detained and was arrested from the city of Cluj-Napoca on Tuesday. He has been detained on behalf of the US government and is awaiting extradition.

Nistor will be charged with fraud, money laundering, computer fraud, and what amounts to racketeering. Reportedly, he will be extradited to the US. Coinflux the crypto exchange platform has not revealed anything about the arrest. In fact, as recently as Dec. 3 the firm was announcing Nistor’s impending appearance at a local radio show.

Nistor is the son of one of the founders of Banca Transilvania, a leading financial institution in Romania.

With that, Coinflux was found around three years ago. As it’s a small platform, the exchange is not registered on CoinMarketCap’s market lists. However, the page even features exchanges with as small volumes as $10,000, along with exchanges having much higher volumes.

On the recent arrest of Nistor, an editorial in a local newspaper shares an opinion against the extradition of Vlad Nistor. It states, “Either Romanian Vlad Nistor rushed USSS guest starters yesterday morning, packed him tonight, and today he wants to pack him in the United States. Nobody opposes extradition from the Romanian authorities, even though the Romanian citizen is only in a criminal investigation stage – no one knows why he is accused (yesterday even the defenders had no idea what to build their minimal defense). Well, how about human rights, the right to an equitable judge, the equality of arms, and so on?”

By now, money laundering is no more an alien thing for the crypto market. But, such incidents make the crypto world more skeptical and less trustworthy. Reportedly on September 29th, known crypto exchange ShapeShift became a part of money laundering by letting anonymous users convert their Bitcoins into other currencies. The regulatory authorities couldn’t track that incident, yet. Around 9 million USD has been exchanged for criminal intentions through the exchange platform in the last two years.

Notably, Shapeshift is a registered platform in Switzerland, while it has offices in Colorado, U.S.A.