While Germany's Bitcoin sales have been one of the hot topics on the agenda lately, the UK has made sales in a different altcoin.
At this point, British authorities confiscated the crypto currencies named Monero (XMR) obtained from the crime after the drug dealer selling deadly 'weight loss pills' confessed his crime.
The UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) sold XMR tokens for British pounds, marking the UK's first XMR sale.
According to the incident, a 28-year-old British citizen named Jack Edward Finney benefited from Monero while selling the illegal drug DNP. After DNP, it was classified as poison by the UK Home Office.
Adrian Foster, lead prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), said of the XMR seizure: “This is the first case where we have converted Monero currency into cash. It shows that criminals cannot hide their money in any cryptocurrency in the hope of being safe from the authorities.” said.
Andrew Quinn, Head of the FSA's National Food Crime Unit, said: “We welcome the court's decision to force Jack Finney to hand over the £23,000 he earned by selling lethal substances on the dark web. Whatever format the money is in, we will find and confiscate it.” said.
XMR was converted into British pounds by British authorities. The XMRs were sold through an undisclosed “cryptocurrency trading platform.”
What is Monero (XMR)?
Monero is one of the largest privacy tokens that hides the addresses and transactions of people on its network. Therefore, it has become a popular token that people use when they do not want their illegal activities to be monitored.
Since Monero is a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency, it cannot be tracked or traced. Monero is widely used by criminals to conduct transactions on the dark web.
Binance, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, announced that Monero (XMR) was delisted along with three altcoins on February 20, 2024.
*This is not investment advice.