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“The Ministry of Justice will put its own bill, which sees the virtual money brokerage itself as illegal and entirely closes the market, and plans to begin full-scale ministry discussions this week,” the service reported, according to a translation.
The authorities had already announced in December that it might proceed to apply greater scrutiny amid growing trade volume in the exchanges, including moves to curtail anonymous trading.

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The news represents a substantial expansion in the developing scrutiny placed on the crypto-exchange space by South Korean authorities.
Advances in South Korea have consistently seen prices well above those seen on other marketplaces. Indeed, it is a circumstance that earlier this week led to a contentious change by one popular information service to begin excluding some of the country’s exchanges from its own cryptocurrency price drops.

Reuters reported tonight that Bithumb and Coinone were raided by authorities and tax office officials on Wednesday and Thursday.   Citing workers of both exchanges, that are one of the largest in South Korea, the news agency said officials visited their offices below the investigation into alleged tax evasion.

Released at Thu, 11 Jan 2018 02:42:42 +0000

“Local authorities have also been exploring our firm since this past year, they think what we do is gaming,” a Coinone employee told Reuters. The employee said that the exchange was cooperating with the analysis.
Separately, South Korean news agency SBS has reported   that the South Korean Justice Department is going to prepare legislation that could pave the way for exchanges in the country to be shut down completely.
Editor’s Note: a number of the quotations from this report are translated from Korean.  

Disclaimer: This guide shouldn’t be accepted as, and isn’t intended to provide, investment advice. Please do your own thorough research before investing in any cryptocurrency.

New reports suggest that the South Korean government is intensifying its moves against the country’s bitcoin exchanges.