China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate Publishes an Article Titled “Systematically Overcoming the Legal Regulatory Dilemmas in Criminal Law for Money Laundering via the Use of Virtual Currencies”

BlockBeats message: On July 13, according to the Procuratorate Daily, the Yuhu District People’s Procuratorate in Xiangtan City, Hunan Province, together with researchers from the Faculty of Law at Xiangtan University, published a joint article proposing a systematic set of response measures to address legal and regulatory difficulties in criminally regulating money-laundering offenses involving virtual currencies.

The article points out that current judicial practice faces three interlocking difficulties: legal classification of conduct, evidence collection, and recovering assets and restitution. First, Article 191 of the Criminal Law on the crime of money laundering still limits predicate (upstream) crimes to seven categories, causing many cases to be handled only as the offense of concealing or hiding (money concealment). Second, methods such as mixers, privacy coins, and cross-chain transfers lead to fragmentation of the evidence chain, making it difficult for traditional investigative methods to penetrate. Third, conflicts in the legal nature of virtual currencies, gaps in procedural rules, and barriers to cross-border cooperation make asset recovery and enforcement difficult.

In response, the article’s authors suggest, in the classification difficulties: at the judicial level, achieve a shift from passive identification to proactive review; at the supervision level, activate the leading and guiding function of prosecutorial supervision and assessment standards. In the verification difficulties: establish adaptable standards for authenticating and reviewing electronic evidence; build a tiered proof standard and reasonable presumption rules; explore the authorization and standardized application of technical investigative measures. In the asset recovery and restitution difficulties: build a cross-departmental coordinated disposition mechanism at the national level; actively participate in and take the lead in the construction of international rules and cooperative platforms.