The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has shut down the TradeOgre cryptocurrency exchange and seized more than $40 million believed to originate from criminal activities.
This is the first time a crypto exchange has been shut down by Canadian law enforcement, and it also marks the largest asset seizure in the country’s history.
TradeOgre was a small exchange platform that focused on user privacy and dealt in niche altcoins, as well as the harder-to-trace Monero cryptocurrency.
It was known for allowing users not to identify through Know Your Customer (KYC) policies and did not comply with Canadian laws and regulations.
Illegal crypto platform
Canadian authorities, specifically the Money Laundering Investigative Team (MLIT), started to investigate TradeOgre’s activity in June 2024, following a tip from Europol.
At the end of July, the platform went offline with no messages from its operators, raising suspicions of an exit scam among some users.
However, the law enforcement agency confirmed to BleepingComputer that it shut down the website at the time as part of this action.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said that the platform was operating illegally because “it failed to register with the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) as a money services business and did not identify its clients.”
Because it did not ask users for identification when creating an account, the investigators believe that TradeOgre was used by cybercriminals to launder money.
Some customers of the platform reacted by saying that not all of them were criminals, like MetaMask’s Taylor Monahan, who admitted that she and her friends were using TradeOgre.
“Very much looking forward to seeing the evidence, and for you to provide recourse to ALL innocent parties you stole money from without notification and without due process,” said Monahan.
In a statement for BleepingComputer, the RCMP said that it could not “confirm that all of the seized cryptocurrencies originated from illegal transactions.”
“We are not in a position to comment on whether specific types of criminal activity, such as extortion payments, were transacted through the platform, nor can we provide details about the criminal sources that may have used it for money laundering” – the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Nevertheless, BleepingComputer was told that the platform was allegedly used to exchange cybercrime proceeds due to its anonymity and Monero support.
The RCMP said that non-criminal customers of TradeOgre “may have recourse through the Canadian court system if the RCMP decides to pursue the forfeiture of the cryptocurrency in question.”
Any questions about the seized assets should be directed to RCMP’s Money Laundering Investigative Team, Canada’s national police said on social media.
