Russian media say that a large amount of bitcoin was accepted as legal payment for an extortion case by the City Court of St. Petersburg. The victim was the target of the plan to steal money from the victim. The office of the prosecutor in Russia’s second-largest city said that the decision will set a new standard for how cases will be handled in the future. If you want to begin trading bitcoin, you really should learn the 5 truths about bitcoin.
Because they stole bitcoin, two Russian men will go to jail. It was found that they were responsible for what they did. Two Russians were found guilty of trying to force someone else to give them more than $90,000.00 in cash and almost $1,000,000 in digital assets. Because of this, they both got long prison sentences of nine and seven years.
According to a report in the cryptocurrency section of the Russian business news site RBC, the City Court of St. Petersburg said that cryptocurrencies were a legal way to pay during the trial.
Since the Moscow government hasn’t decided what the legal status of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is yet, the prosecution thinks this is the first time a punishment like this has been given.
One of the criminals, Pyotr Piron, told G.A. Shemet four years ago that he worked for the Federal Security Service. Piron went to Shemet and asked what the job was about (FSB). According to the story, he threatened to charge Shemet with a crime to get him to give him fiat dollars and bitcoin.
She met didn’t give Piron any money when he asked for it because he didn’t think he was part of the security system. Yevgeny Prigozhin was a former Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs worker who was also a double agent. Piron used Prigozhin to get his own back (MVD).
The two people told Shemet that the police would look into him because he was illegally promoting cryptocurrency. It was found out that Shemet will be the focus of the investigation.
In the summer of 2018, they said that they had arrested the owner of the cryptocurrency and threatened to torture him if he didn’t give them his cash and bitcoin. He gave in to what they wanted in the end.
The missing bitcoin was not taken into account when the municipal court made its first decision. In the ruling, it was said that cryptocurrencies can’t be a civil rights issue or a crime because they aren’t used as a way to pay in the Russian Federation. Russia didn’t have digital money, so this was the case.
In response to an appeal, a court of cassation said that the cryptocurrency could still be seen as a way to pay and sent the case back to the lower court so that it could be looked at again.
The municipal court has made a new decision that takes digital currency into account, but it doesn’t change the jail time for those who broke the law.
A district court in St. Petersburg let the police get back bitcoins that had been stolen a month earlier for a different crime. The suspect was asked to show the police his or her twenty-six bitcoin wallets. These wallets held Ethereum worth one billion rubles (ETH).
What the new law could mean for taxpayers
One goal of the new bitcoin tax law is to create the Federal Law on Digital Financial Assets and Digital Currencies.
The bill says that citizens, residents, registered legal and corporate entities, registered representations of foreign companies, and international organizations on the territory of the Russian Federation must tell the Russian tax authorities about their ownership rights, transactions, and holdings of digital currency.
The bill says that it is a tax violation to not record transactions with digital currency in a timely manner or to give the wrong information. In this case, the fine must be equal to 10% of the total value (in rubles) of the cryptocurrency that was sent or received. The national tax authorities will figure out how much the cryptocurrency is worth by looking at its market price at the time of the transaction.