Crypto exchange platform ShapeShift’s CEO Erik Voorhees proved that Wall Street Journal’s report from September 28th is a scam. WSJ reported that more than $9 million of “dirty money” had been laundered through ShapeShift’s crypto exchange. The paper traces over $ 88, 6 million being transferred through 46 exchange platforms in total. The experiment involved downloading the latest transactions in 15-second intervals and examining the data from exchanges.
ShapeShift’s CEO Erik Voorhees released a blog post, confirming ShapeShift and Wall Street Journal have been partnering for five months, but the information the journalists obtained was “misinterpreted” and not corresponding to the truth.
In their report, WSJ showed how the illegally obtained funds were laundered – through converting Bitcoin (BTC) into the anonymous and untraceable Monero (XMR).
Voorhees refuted Wall Street Journal’s accusations, stating that ShapeShift’s algorithm has an anti-money-laundering mechanism (AML), which implements blockchain technology into transactions.
ShapeShift’s CEO also accused WSJ of “not signalizing about a potential fraud” in their reports. To “compile their story,” the WSJ did extensive research on illicit behaviour but did not inform the exchanges about the frauds.
Voorhees continued the accusations against WSJ, claiming that Wall Street Journal’s authors did not comprehend the nature of Blockchain and how ShapeShift works. WSJ reporters mistakenly interpreted Blockchain information and misled the readers by putting $70,000 in frauds on ShapeShift.
“600$ worth of questionable cryptocurrency has been transferred to an exchange, different from ShapeShift. Ten months later, the exchange made a transaction to ShapeShift, which mislead WSJ’s reporters into thinking there is some money laundering going on. But ShapeShift is a client of that exchange, so WSJ did not properly read the data, stored on the Blockchain.”, Voorhees stated.
ShapeShift’s CEO concluded that the company is striving to pioneer an entirely new financial system, and less than 0,2% of all transactions on ShapeShift might be subjected to fraud.