GPay was a scam cryptocurrency platform that was using fake celebrity endorsements to rip off investors, but the UK High court finally put an end to that.
A notice was released by the UK Insolvency Service that XTraderFX, which was the trading name of GPay Ltd, was getting shut down after an estimated £1.5 million ($1.8m) were lost. That equals about 180 victimised private citizens.
People ended up without their money most commonly when they attempted to withdraw them. They were either stonewalled through various means or were completely denied access, or the employees of the fraudulent exchange asked for additional personal documents. All of these were means to deny people access to their own money.
On top of everything else, the platform kept telling clients that they didn’t need any trading experience to begin investing.
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I am glad this scam was shut down, but I wonder whether people will ever see any of their lost investments again. Probably not.

Centra Tech’s promoter, an initial coin offering scam, plead guilty before an American Court. Robert Farkas, who is 33, who promoted Central Tech, admitted before the US court that he defrauded investors for $25 million. Central Tech became quite famous after being endorsed by celebrities like boxer  Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled. Floyd Mayweather even called himself Crypto Mayweather at some point, as far as I remember, which was a play on his other nickname – Money Mayweather. Both of them were slapped with a pretty large fine for their involvement with and endorsement of a scam company that  ripped people off with millions of US dollars.
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It's very annoying when celebrities promote things blindly without bothering to look into the product they're promoting because they're too blinded by the payout.

Albania updated its cryptocurrency legislation – the parliament passed a new bill which will implement a legal framework governing digital currencies in the country. The law was signed on 21st May and it is called “On Financial Markets Based on the Technology of Distributed Ledgers,”.
This legislation will control the licensing for all cryptocurrency-related activities within the Albanian jurisdiction and it was passed with a majority – 88 people voted in favour and 16 voted against it.
The draft for the bill was given to the parliament last week by Anila Denaj, who said:
“the draft law aims to regulate the conditions for licensing, exercising the activity of operators and stock exchanges and supervising them, as well as preventing abusive practices in the market, where severe fines are stipulated for anyone who violates the provisions of the law”
With this law the small European country is aiming to turn itself into a local cryptocurrency hotspot as coin companies can now operate legally in it.
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Hopefully more European countries, especially EU countries, will follow suit.

An arrest warrant has been issued by a Texas judge for the former Republican    Washington state Se. David Schmidt and his alleged accomplice, Robert Dunlap. They were charged with a $4.3 million ICO scam. The warrant was issued after they did not show up at a hearing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). According to SEC, they are still running their “Meta 1 Coin” scam.
According to judge Pitman “If incarcerated, Dunlap and Schmidt will be unable to continue Meta 1’s operations, create marketing videos, or email their putative investors,", which was his reasoning for the arrest warrant.
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It is unfortunate that the courts allowed these people to remain free and continue scamming others for so long. And now they are in the wind because of that inaction.

Binance recently announced it is launching its own Bitcoin mining pool. For now only that cryptocurrency is covered but Binance appears to have plans to include others.
The mining pool is named Binance Pool. It will be incorporated with Binance’s ecosystem and according to the exchange’s plans there will be spot exchanges, derivative products and more.
The founder of the exchange, CEO Changpeng Zhao said:
As an integral part of the global crypto market, empowering miners will therein enable significant growth and scale in the larger industry. With Binance Pool, we aim to establish a comprehensive platform for miners that will bring more possibilities to the mining industry by bridging traditional mining to financial services.”
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Binance's expansion has been quite impressive, I wonder what else they'll do.

South Africa has become yet another country to adopt legislation regulating the increasingly popular cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin may not have been very impressive lately, but it turns out that 10.7% of South African internet users have invested in the cryptocurrency in some way, which drew the attention of the authorities.
The Intergovernmental Fintech Working Group (IFWG), among the members of which are the South African Reserve Bank, the Financial Sector Conduct Authority and the National Treasury, issued a policy paper, according to which cryptocurrencies will “remain without legal tender status.”
They are also seeking to create a a crypto oversight framework in order to regulate the local cryptocurrency industry. There will be license issuing guidelines and a push for detailed cash flow reports.
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This is better than banning cryptocurrencies altogether, I guess, though it’s a long road to actually embracing them.

Gibraltar has decided to implement new rules regulating the cryptocurrency trade in its jurisdiction. So far they have been considered to be one of the more friendly cryptocurrency destinations, but now there is a push for new legislation to keep the crypto market under some measure of control.
Gibraltar has a minister of minister of digital and financial services - Albert Isola – who recently spoke about the impending changes. “We considered regulating crypto assets, but concluded that it was too challenging to do it safely…Therefore, we opted for regulating this space in a more financial services-based way” he said.
In other words, they are planning to regulate cryptos like the financial sector, rather than treat them as just assets.
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In my opinion, this may actually lead to wider adoption of cryptocurrencies. The more mainstream they are, the better when it comes to that.

Considering the health crisis the Singaporean regulatory body Singapore’s Monetary Authority (MAS) has issued a a conditional registration relief for some cryptocurrency exchanges, which allows them to operate without a license. This is a similar act as the FCA decision to request all ts listed companies suspend the publication of preliminary financial reports by two weeks at least.
MAS allowed over 400 cryptocurrency exchanges to work without a license, which means that they are are exempt from registering under the Singapore Payment Services Act (PSA). They are supposed to get a license by July 28th but due to the pandemic that date remains unfixed. Among the listed cryptoexchanges operating like this are Binance, Ripple, CoinBase, and Paxos.
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This sounds reasonable but I worry that it may lead to people taking advantage and scams.