US federal court sends Danvers Bitcoin exchanger to prison for laundering over $1m

A Danvers resident was convicted and sentenced for running an unregistered Bitcoin transmitting business that ignored federal anti-money laundering laws.

A Danvers man was sentenced on Friday to six years in prison for running an unlicensed Bitcoin ( BTC ) money transmitting business that authorities say converted over $1 million in cash, including money linked to scammers and a drug dealer.

Trung Nguyen — also known as “DCS420” — was sentenced to six years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and was ordered to forfeit more than $1.5 million after being convicted in November 2024 of conducting an unlicensed money transmitting business and money laundering, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a Friday press release .

Nguyen owned and operated National Vending between 2017 and 2020, a business that accepted cash from customers and sent them Bitcoin in return for a fee, but he failed to register it with FinCEN or comply with anti-money laundering rules required under federal law.

Prosecutors claim Nguyen knowingly concealed his operation by presenting National Vending as a vending machine business and used encrypted messaging to make tracing transactions harder.

“He [Nguyen] used encrypted messaging apps to communicate with customers, using technologies that made it more difficult to trace Bitcoin transactions and breaking cash deposits of more than $10,000 into smaller cash deposits over consecutive days or at different branches of the same bank.”

U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Massachusetts

Prosecutors say Nguyen accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from individuals, including a methamphetamine dealer and victims of romance scams.

In early May, Alex Mashinsky, founder of the bankrupt crypto lending platform Celsius Network, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for his role in the company’s collapse, which cost users billions of dollars. Prosecutors said Mashinsky defrauded thousands of people, many of whom lost their life savings, while stealing more than $48 million from the firm. He pleaded guilty to securities and commodities fraud.