While investors are doing their best to keep pace with the rapid changes in the crypto market, indecent officials in South Korea are trying to profit from insider information.
While the world has been discussing the ban on cryptocurrency trading activities that is still being considered in South Korea and that has caused a significant cryptocurrency market fall, the country has provided new information to talk about.
As it was reported, South Korean authorities confirmed that cryptocurrency insider trading activity was carried out by government officials. The South Korean Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) has already started investigation of this case, and promised to make all findings on the case of illegal trading of cryptocurrency by its staff members publicly available.
The Financial authorities confirmed the fact that some of their employees invested in cryptocurrencies and sold them following insider information before the announcement of governmental crypto regulatory measures.
It is reported that one of the officials suspected of having sold the crypto assets was an FSS employee hired to the Policy Coordination Office to work on the development of measures to prevent the speculation in cryptocurrencies. The official reportedly purchased cryptocurrencies worth 13 million won ($12,220) on July 3, 2017, and on December 11, 2017, he managed to sold his crypto assets for around 20 million won, which means that he got nearly 7 million won as profit.
As the FSS senior management noted, the Korean Public Service Ethics Act “strictly restricts the stock trading of public officials in order to prevent misuse of internal information”. Nevertheless, currently, “cryptocurrency is not defined as a financial asset or currency and there is no code of ethics and no code of conduct for virtual money investment in the FSS regulations”. Despite this fact “the misuse of internal information could lead to punishment”.
This week, we already wrote about the South Korean plans to impose fines for those cryptocurrency investors, who refuse to convert their virtual accounts into real-name ones. In the near future, to secure the cryptocurrency market from fraud, new measures regulating this issue will be implemented, which means that only real-name accounts will be allowed.
According to the Bank of Korea Governor Lee Ju-yeol:
“It’s understandable that the government is pushing ahead with its plans to further regulate the cryptocurrency market, as the prices of cryptocurrencies are showing sudden ups and downs. The trend is not good from the perspective of investors”.
It’s worth noting that today, after the days of decline when the major currencies prices were drastically falling ,the cryptocurrency market begins gaining momentum. At the press time, Bitcoin is trading at $11 763,10, which means a 17,53% increase for the last 24 hours, according to the data from CoinMarketCap.
Ripple’s increase is more than 56%, while Ethereum is 25,19% up for the last 24 hours. As CoinMarketCap informs, the total market capitalization is $580 billion.
South Korea is not the only country trying to keep crypto exchange and trading activities under control. This week, it has become known that a complete ban on buying and trading cryptocurrencies over centralized exchanges was proposed in China.
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