The US Department of Justice has announced charges against two Chinese intelligence officers who allegedly bribed a double agent with Bitcoin.
In an announcement, the Justice Department said Guochun He and Zheng Wang attempted to obstruct the prosecution of an unnamed global telecommunications company based in China, which allegedly involved paying a U.S. government employee roughly $61,000 in bribes using Bitcoin However, the individual was a double agent working on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and did not move against authorities in the Eastern District of New York in the case against the China-based company.
He and Wang used Wasabi Wallet to conceal the BTC transactions allegedly used for bribes. The firm reported that the privacy wallet had previously been used in an attempt to launder BTC from the July 2020 Twitter hack and the attacks on crypto exchanges Bitfinex in 2016 and KuCoin in 2020.
According to the Justice Department, the two Chinese intelligence officers began the scheme in 2019 by directing the double agent to steal confidential information related to the prosecution of the company which Elliptic suggested may be Huawei. He allegedly made separate bribes of $41,000 and $20,000 in BTC to the agent for providing secret documents and rewarding the release of information, respectively.
