Operation Colossus is a movement that was launched by the Brazilian Federal Police as well as the Brazilian tax authority, which has now entered its final stage.
They have executed hundreds of court orders under this movement against crypto exchanges, fake companies, and arbitrage agents in four states of Brazil.
This operation involved a total of 158 government officers of which 130 were federal policemen and they put search and seizure orders into effect for four forex institutions and six crypto exchanges.
Final stage
The final stage of the said operation was launched on September 22nd by the Brazilian tax authority and the Federal Police, with the investigation going on for almost four years.
More than 100 court orders have been executed in this operation that targets about six crypto exchanges in the country, four forex institutions as well as arbitrage agents that are suspected of assisting in money laundering activities.
Estimates show that Operation Colossus was carried out by almost 130 federal policemen, who delivered 37 search and seizure warrants and 2 arrest warrants in four states.
These states were Santa Catarina, Sao Paolo, Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. 28 Brazilian tax authority officers also participated in the operation.
The details
Allegations show that the criminals were conducting money laundering operations with the use of crypto assets through the remittance system.
The Federal Police disclosed that almost $391 million had been moved by these exchange operations. It said that the official financial system was used for entering and circulating these funds.
The criminals took advantage of shell companies for this purpose that did not have any financial or economic capacity.
The funds would pass through transit accounts and were then converted into cryptocurrency that could be used abroad.
Other operations
According to the authorities, there were about three groups were involved in these criminal activities.
The first group comprised a high-level arbitrage agent who would buy large quantities of crypto assets in countries, such as Hong Kong, Singapore and the United States.
The second group of criminals involved crypto exchanges that were used as the middlemen and the final group was composed of individuals and fake companies that bought these crypto assets.
Many of the customer names that were used in this operation could not have bought cryptocurrencies. This is because some of these were deceased, some were elderly individuals above the age of 90 and some were in assistance programs.
A single accountant was able to manage about 1,300 of these fraudulent companies. Operation Colossus is one of the biggest operations of its kind to be conducted in Brazil.
There have also been a few other operations in the country, such as Compliance and Kryptos, which had been executed last year by government forces.
With Brazil becoming one of the top countries in Latin America to see a high rate of crypto adoption, it is not surprising that criminal activities in the space have also increased and this requires action from authorities.
