Bitcoin Daily: IRS To Meet With Crypto Groups; Thieves Take $630,000 In Ether From Lender bZx

The IRS has invited cryptocurrency groups to meet for a regulatory summit March 3 to discuss how the two can work together going forward, published reports said Tuesday (Feb. 18).

The overall theme will be balancing taxpayer services with the IRS’ regulatory needs.

The summit, according to BloombergTax, will include four 90-minute panels on technology updates, problems with cryptocurrency exchanges, tax return preparation and regulatory guidance and compliance.

The IRS has been trying to combat cryptocurrency tax evasion, and the agency has been working on establishing more concrete guidelines for digital currencies. The summit will include both private sector panelists and government officials sharing their views and engaging with the audience. Officials speaking will include those from the IRS as well as some from the Department of Treasury’s other offices and bureaus.

Meanwhile, DeFi project bZx was robbed for the second time this week on Tuesday when fraudsters made off with $630,000 in ether.

The attack came just after 3:00 UTC on Tuesday, with the scammers taking out a flash loan of 7,500 ETH, or around $1.98 million. To do so, they used 3,518 ETH to purchase synthetic USD stablecoin from the issuer. Then they used that to post for the bZx loan, as collateral, according to Coindesk.

They then used further ETH funds to bid up the value of the sUSD, inflating the price, taking out another loan and pocketing the remaining ETH.

The attack comes just days after the first one, which claimed over $350,000 worth of digital currency from the bank. Cryptocurrency-related crimes have skyrocketed in the past year.

In other news, the Financial Conduct Authority’s anti-money-laundering initiatives have led to complications for EPayments Systems, which had one million user accounts frozen on Tuesday.

The electronic money institution, authorized by the U.K., had to ban new account openings as well until the FCA gave the OK.

Customers of EPayments will not have access to their funds for transfers, deals, withdraws or anything else. The FCA recently took over as sole AML authority for crypto businesses, and as such, cryptocurrency firms are facing more scrutiny than before.