"Ex-Beijing Official Gets 11 Years for Bitcoin Laundering"

Beijing's former deputy director of the Financial Bureau, Hao Gang, has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for his involvement in a Bitcoin money laundering operation, according to a report. The intermediate people's court in Beijing also imposed a fine of 1.3 million yuan ($178,380) on Hao, and ordered the confiscation of the proceeds from his crimes.

Hao was found guilty of assisting an executive of a leading crypto mining company by lifting border controls in exchange for bribes totaling tens of millions of yuan. The court's decision comes nearly two years after Hao was investigated for bribery and money laundering.

The sentencing of Hao highlights the growing concern among Chinese authorities about the use of cryptocurrencies in illicit activities. Last year, a Chinese state-owned newspaper warned that corrupt government officials could be using crypto to avoid investigations by transferring funds into cold storage.

Mo Hongxian, a professor at Wuhan University Law School, told the Legal Daily, a newspaper controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, that the governance and regulation of cryptocurrencies need to adapt to the modern types of corruption they enable. Mo pointed out two main challenges: the difficulty of supervising and cracking down on transactions, especially those involving distributed peer-to-peer virtual currencies like Bitcoin, and the difficulty of identifying and processing these transactions, given that cryptocurrencies are not officially recognized in China but serve as equivalent functions in reality.