The fines could be from 500 to 1,500 Brazilian reals, an approximate of 120 to 360 USD.

As a method to improve the collection of taxes and prevent the illegal use of any type of value, the Tax Agency corresponding to the Department of Federal Revenue of Brazil(RFB), issued a recent statement in which it states that a new resolution which dictates a tax code updated to the new financial processes was approved. It is for this reason that now all taxpayers must declare all transactions they make with Bitcoin or with any other cryptocurrency, otherwise, they may be fined.

When regulation No. 1888 was established, last May, to the tax code in the South American country, the details that revolve around the mandatory nature of the law had not been specified. Thus, on December 6^th, a continuation in detail of the provision that must be adopted by all taxpayers who declare before the tax body and conduct transactions in cryptocurrencies was published in a Brazilian news portal. Therefore, its adoption is mandatory.

According to the data offered by the issuing entity of the statement, the regulations extend to all transactions made with cryptocurrencies, thus comprising the purchase and sale of the asset, deposits, withdrawals, donations, exchanges, among other types of operations. In the same way, the rule must be applied by all those natural and legal people, as well as companies and organizations.

The list of tariffs for breach of the ordinance was also announced, stating that those who do not comply with the declaration of these assets, will be subject to fines ranging from 500 Brazilian reals (BRD), up to 1500 BRD. This is the equivalent to an amount in US dollars from 120 USD to 360 USD.

According to data supplied by the RFB, by August of the current year, the market for crypto assets in Brazil exceeds even the second-largest stock exchange in the country, B3, which to date amounted to more than 800,000 active customers.

The RFB in Financial Troubles

Last September, some local media warned that RFB could lose the necessary funds for its operation since the end of that month.

According to the press release, the tax center commented that the country’s government had not unlocked the funds necessary for its operation. In this way, they would run the risk of having to cancel national and international agreements with contractors, they would also cease to grant the ID numbers of all taxpayers, and it would be impossible for them to pay the income tax refunds.

According to the possibility of financial failure, the exchanges of digital currencies could also be affected since to all transactions and user data to be reported, they must be performed through the RFB system. So, in simple terms, these companies would be legally obliged to comply with the rule, but it would be impossible for them to notify the data without the active system.

By María Rodríguez

Crypto-related suspicious activity reports are often linked with crime, scams, and other similar things. However, it is the first step in a process that starts with identifying potentially dangerous issues at an early stage.

From May to the present day, crypto firms have submitted an abnormally high number of Suspicious Activity Reports, or SAR, with 7,100. The information was provided by Kenneth Blanco, who is the director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) at a conference this week.

The news is a follow-up of the organization’s guidance in May, explaining how the Banking Secrecy Act is applied to the current digital asset landscape. The mentioned act is one of the strongest foundations of the anti-money laundering regulation in the United States.

7.4 Million Queries per Year

“Each day, FinCEN, law enforcement, regulators, and others query this data—that equates to an average of 7.4 million queries per year. Those queries identify an average of 18.2 million filings that are responsive or useful to ongoing investigations, examinations, victim identification, analysis and network development, sanctions development, and U.S. national security activities, among many, many other uses that help protect our nation, deter crime, and save lives,” Blanco said.

Of the previously mentioned total, 2100 filers made a direct reference to the guidance, and dozens of new institutions and entities filed their initial report. The number is certainly high, but it is an indication of enhanced surveillance on potentially illicit activity by crypto ATMs, exchanges and trading platforms.

“It is encouraging that CVC entities, dozens of whom had never filed a SAR report prior to the May advisory, are using the red flags and reporting suspicious activity back to us,” Blanco said about the enhanced surveillance activity around the industry.

Venezuela and Crypto Suspicious Activity

One of the nations in which suspicious activity in the crypto industry has hit new heights (or lows, depending on how you view it) is Venezuela. The statement was confirmed by Blanco in the event. The South American nation, the one with the oil-based coin “Petro,” has seen the number of unregistered money services proliferate in recent times.

These crypto firms usually report lots of darknet-linked clients transactions, a higher number of scams, and more attempts to target older generations, who are especially vulnerable as a group given their limited knowledge of technology resources and crypto spaces.

According to Blanco, all the crypto-related services and institutions should consider enhancing or improving their crypto SAR reporting, making it tighter and more effective. “If the answer is no, they need to reevaluate whether their institutions are exposed to cryptocurrency,” the director explained.

Enhancing Awareness

Blanco’s thoughts come in the middle of an awareness-enhancing process, as more crypto exchanges, analysts companies, and related crypto services shore up their efforts to expand suspicious activity reporting.

According to a Forbes story that ran just a few days ago, there is a confidential “Indicators of Suspicion for Virtual Asset Service Providers” report, which is a playbook for detecting suspicious activity, created by the stakeholders.

By Andres Chavez

We are deep in the digital world, the token world. Companies and organizations around the planet are constantly looking at ways to “tokenize” assets and goods, and the blockchain provides a fantastic platform to achieve that particular goal.

Nike, one of the planet’s market leaders in sports footwear, reportedly patented shoes that are tokenized on the Ethereum blockchain as an NFT, or non-fungible token. The information was provided by a known crypto news site this week.

The date of the patent is December 10, 2019. It talks about a digital asset for shoes and several avenues to take advantage of it. One of the ways outlined in the document is as an Ethereum ERC721 or ERC1155 token to authenticate a physical shoe and perform transactions with it.

An ID Code

There will be an owner identification code that, after a person acquires a specific shoe, will be linked with the item’s 10-digit identification code. The token will become unlocked after the purchase has been completed.

The goal is to achieve more transparency and ensure the authenticity of items. The patent describes the system’s intentions:

“Prospective and current owners […] may buy and sell digital assets through one or more blockchain ledgers operating on the decentralized computing system. […] By way of example, and not limitation, a user may buy a new pair of highly sought after sneakers from a verified vendor who may provide authenticated provenance records for the sneakers. […] After receiving the shoe box containing the purchased sneakers, the user scans the box UPC with a barcode scan feature in a sneakers app operating on the user’s smartphone.”

The giant footwear company also seems to indicate that the development of the token is related to shoe sales: the system will let customers verify and check the scarcity of some of the circulating items.

“When a consumer buys a genuine pair of shoes a digital representation of a show may be generated, linked with the consumer, and assigned a cryptographic token, where the digital shoe and cryptographic token collectively represent a ‘CryptoKick.'”

Transferring Ownership

After the pair of shoes has been sold, the ownership of the item in question is transferred with the physical asset. To manage the property of the tokens, there will be a dedicated app, which will also promote brand management.

Borrowing some concepts of CryptoKitties, a game of collectible cats, Nike suggests, according to the patent document that the commercialized items, in this case, the shoes, can be bred.

“Using the digital asset, the buyer is enabled to securely trade or sell the tangible pair of shoes, trade or sell the digital shoe, store the digital shoe in a cryptocurrency wallet or other digital blockchain locker, intermingle or “breed” the digital shoe with another digital shoe to create “shoe offspring,” and, based on rules of acceptable shoe manufacturability, have the newly bred shoe offspring custom made as a new, tangible pair of shoes.”

By Andres Chavez

The regulator said that the company is not authorized to operate, nor offer investment plans to Paraguayans.

As a way to protect its citizens, the National Securities Commission of Paraguay (CNV) recently issued an alert to Paraguayans about a company that is not authorized to operate within its territory.

This is BTCInvestimiento.com, a company that offers its services for investments with bitcoins. The warning assured that the company is not registered in any of the regulatory entities of the country and that it does not enjoy the legal and trust acceptance granted by the state.

According to the CNV, the company set up advertising spaces on social networks and in the media where they offered investment plans involving bitcoins, which the regulatory and supervisory body does not approve or endorse without proper authorization. The alert was disseminated through the CNV’s Twitter account, where they also added that they did not know of this company.

When verifying the web address of this company, it was found that the page is offline. Despite this, some Paraguayan media reported that among the investment plans the company promises profits of 1% up to 2% daily for 300 days, inviting citizens, in this way, to invest BTC in their system.

Among the promotional messages published by the company to attract investors, it is detailed that the company is entirely Paraguayan and that they are dedicated exclusively to cryptocurrency investment. “BTCInvestimiento.com, a 100 % Paraguayan cryptocurrency company located in Paraguay. Invest, buy and sell bitcoin with BTC Investimiento”, says one of its commercials.

According to the country’s regulatory body, when the company makes available to citizens plans to invest using a type of contract, an offer of securities is already being made. Is also says that to perform such an action, it is necessary to have the registration and authorization of the CNV. Besides, the company must be registered in its system to be checked and certify that they meet all the requirements required by law.

The central intention of the warning is to notify people who seek to invest in these types of assets so that they can avoid falling into companies which seek to cheat with misleading offers. They also emphasized that operations are not authorized and that they may run the risk of loss of investment.

This news arises a few months after Sebastián García, who is a deputy member of the Patria Querida political party, reported that they hope to write and approve, by the end of 2020, a law that regulates the environment of cryptocurrencies in the Latin American country. To this point is added the control actions for these companies.

Currently, the government’s position regarding these assets is neutral and it hopes to regulate and establish a law that accepts the use of cryptocurrencies. However,  several companies in the country offer these services to Paraguayans, such as LocalBitcoins, AirTM, Bitex, eToro, and others.

By María Rodríguez

The victims are blackmailed with an e-mail sent from their own account. This is a form of usurpation called spoofing.

It was reported by Telemedellín that Colombian police authorities were warning of a type of fraud in which attackers request a ransom in Bitcoin (BTC) in exchange for not revealing personal information allegedly hijacked to their victims.

The most striking thing about the scam is that the victims receive an e-mail from their own account. The complaint is made by the Citizen Security operations officer for the town of Valle de Aburrá, Colonel Iván Santamaría.

According to Santamaría, this type of practice is known as spoofing, a form of identity theft in electronic communications. However, attackers do not take control of the access to their victims’ e-mail accounts, but have the ability to send messages from any account. The victims, upon receiving the threatening e-mail from their own account, consider that their data are effectively compromised.

In the e-mails to which the Colombian officer refers, the victim is requested to pay a ransom in Bitcoin equivalent to EUR 500. Additionally, in the said e-mails the attacker credits himself with the hijacking of personal data of the affected party, who receives a Bitcoin address for sending the funds and a deadline of 30 hours to do so.

Colombia and Computer Crimes

The same report by Telemedellín states that the incidence of computer crimes in Valle de Aburrá has decreased by 50% so far in 2019, compared to the previous year, according to local police sources.

However, there are not few computer crimes in Colombia, according to the study Trends in Cybercrime in Colombia 2019-2020, conducted by entities of the Colombian Chamber of Information Technology and Telecommunications (CCIT) and the Center for Capabilities for Cybersecurity of Colombia (C4) of Colombian National Police.

In that document, it is mentioned that there have been more than 28,000 computer crimes against businesses this year. There have been more than 52,000 incidents of that type since 2017, according to the same study. It should be noted that at least 8,000 of these correspond to crimes of identity theft.

Spoofing with Payments in Bitcoin

In early November, a publication in the Spanish media Público gave an account of such practice. Additionally, the text mentions that that practice is not new and that it involves more than just requesting ransom in Bitcoin.

In that article, the same spoofing is mentioned in a message that might follow the one mentioned in the Colombian environment. In the e-mail cited in that note, a payment already made by the victim is mentioned. However, the attacker claims that the amount does not correspond to the one requested.

In addition, a different Bitcoin address and a new 24-hour payment deadline are provided in the new e-mail. The address cited in that text has not received transactions, at the time of writing this article.

Another prominent background was the scam to Uphold users in November 2018. Regarding Black Friday offers, users of that platform received an e-mail from Uphold’s account offering a refund of 15% of the funds that they had in their accounts.

Although Uphold reported that it was a fraud, after its email service was compromised, the address indicated by the scammers received up to 0.53742844 BTC. At the time of the fraud, that figure was equivalent to about USD 2,400. Now, the same figure exceeds USD 3,600.

By Willmen Blanco

With the support of the Innovation Fund, a Mexican startup develops its blockchain. The United Nations Organization is interested in open source projects.

Since 2015, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has been exploring ways to leverage blockchains to support its global humanitarian efforts and accelerate results for children.

For that reason, the organization’s Innovation Fund provided financing to six companies operating in the sector, three of which are in Latin America. Among the companies in the region is Prescrypto, which developed an electronic prescription service in Mexico.

The objective of the United Nations Fund is to invest in all types of open source technologies, to put them to the benefit of children, according to Christopher Fabian, co-director of the UNICEF innovation section, who highlighted the reasons why the international organization is interested in blockchain.

Fabian noted that UNICEF is in the phase of discovering how blockchain technologies can be used to create a better world. “That is exactly the stage when its Innovation Fund invests: when our financing, technical support, and focus on vulnerable populations can help a technology grow and mature in the most fair and equitable way possible,” he said.

To give deeper details on how the Latin American startup Prescrypto is working with UNICEF, Everardo Barojas, co-founder and director of the company, explains the main reason why the blockchain project that he represents won the support of the organization.

In fact, Barojas believes that situations can become more complex when it is understood that the lack of correspondence between doctors, pharmacies, and patients can endanger many lives. This led to the question of how to maintain good communication between all the actors in the blockchain, when most medicine outlets are stores for family subsistence or independent stores. Actually, of the existing 40,000 places of sale of medicines, only 13,000 belong to pharmacy chains.

It is required that the pharmacy staff is fully trained to verify that a medical prescription is signed, the data of both doctor and the patient are complete and the professional certificate coincides with that of the specialist who issued the prescription. This task becomes more complex if the staff is not trained, since the number of medical prescriptions is increasing.

In this regard, the CEO of Prescrypto states that the project arose from the need to develop an application that would allow patients, providers and payers to have a blockchain-based infrastructure to collect prescription information, send it safely to pharmacies and provide a history of the medicines used by each patient.

To this end, he developed his blockchain, called Rexchain, which is open source and therefore free, with a model similar to that used for Bitcoin. The difference is that the encryption technology is RSA (Rivest, Shamir and Adleman), which has an elliptic curve system instead of a cryptography system.

Among the technical specifications that Barojas considers relevant about the RexChain blockchain, he highlights that its infrastructure is based on the electronic signature laws of Latin America, where they intend to expand. Therefore, they are preparing to make themselves known in Chile, to follow with Colombia and Argentina.

The startup is based on a system that includes ensuring the integrity of the data in the medical records, documenting the patient’s consent to share the data and publishing the information in the provider directory, so that it is possible to identify the doctors and hospitals with credentials.

Another contribution achieved by a blockchain-based application is to guarantee the integrity of the data, as well as that of the doctor whist ensuring that the prescription is used only once to buy medicines. It also contributes to such a transparent level of traceability of medicines that can increase operational efficiency and help decrease the rates of drug theft. It is worth noting that these elements are consistent with UNICEF’s efforts.

By Willmen Blanco