An offshore cryptocurrency trading firm pleaded guilty on Monday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan to a charge of operating as an unlicensed money transmitting business in the United States while seeking customers in New York and other states.
In pleading guilty, the Seychelles-based company that operates OKX, which the government described as one of the world’s largest crypto firms, also agreed to pay $504 million in fines and penalties. The company still has operations in the United States.
Financial firms, including crypto currency exchanges, that operate in the United States are required to register with federal regulators as a money transmitting business in order to comply with anti-money laundering laws.
OKX had flagrantly violated that requirement for years, federal prosecutors said.
“For over seven years, OKX knowingly violated anti-money laundering laws and avoided implementing required policies to prevent criminals from abusing our financial system,” said Matthew Podolsky, acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan.
The guilty plea was entered in court by Christina Deng, a company secretary based in Hong Kong, according to her LinkedIn profile. Reading from a prepared statement before U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Polk Failla, Ms. Deng said, “we deeply regret” not having obtained the proper license.
“On behalf of the company, we thank the government and your honor as well,” she said.
Later, David Meister, a lawyer for the company, said the charge the company pleaded guilty to in the settlement “contained absolutely no charges of money laundering.”
Mr. Podolsky said in a statement the exchange’s failure to register with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, had allowed billions of dollars of suspicious transactions to be processed.
Federal authorities said U.S. customers had generated hundreds of millions of dollars in trading fees for the exchange from 2018 to 2024 — a time when it was operating in violation of federal law.
Even though OKX was not supposed to be accepting business from U.S. customers, authorities said it marketed itself in the country, including serving as a sponsor of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
Aux Cayes FinTech, the parent company of the OKX exchange and other affiliates, said in a statement that no customers were harmed in the process and the number of U.S. customers on its platform “amounted to a small percentage of the company’s worldwide customer population.”
The company’s website, which was last updated in January, said it was registered as a money transmitting business in the United States but did not provide services to customers in a number of states, including New York.
In a news release, federal prosecutors said the company received a 25 percent reduction in the agreed-upon fine because it had taken remedial steps to during the investigation.
The guilty plea by OKX comes as the Securities and Exchange Commission pulls back on its effort to regulate the crypto industry with enforcement actions. On Monday, the online brokerage Robinhood said the S.E.C. had informed it that the regulator was closing an investigation into the sale of digital assets on its platform.
Last week, Coinbase, the nation’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, said the S.E.C. had agreed to dismiss its lawsuit filed against the firm. The S.E.C. had charged that the digital currencies sold on Coinbase’s platform were unregistered securities.
President Trump, who became an ardent supporter of the crypto industry during the presidential campaign, has vowed the S.E.C. would stop making life so difficult for crypto firms.