Seoul Seizes Unpaid Taxes In Crypto

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There is a marketing saying that used to mean that whenever you wanted to see what would be the next trendy fashion items for young women in Europe and the US, you would have to look at Tokyo. Back in the 1990s, street fashion in the fashionable districts of Tokyo, such as Harajuku and Shibuya, was always guaranteed to be copied by the West.

Over the past decade the influence of Japan has waned while that of South Korea has grown. One of the latest fads where Seoul is first among its peers of developed economies is the adoption of crypto. During the 2017-2018 ICO bull run of Bitcoin, about a third of South-Korean millennials was said to have invested.

Ripple and Stellar

By now, even the older generations are into crypto as well. To see how far this is already evolved, just look at the report in the Korea Times of this week which admitted that tax delinquents in the country, are now seeing their crypto holdings seized by the government in order to confiscate monies.

The Seoul government said:

We are continually being asked by delinquent taxpayers to refrain from selling their cryptocurrencies as they will pay their taxes.

We believe the taxpayers expect the value of their cryptocurrencies to increase further due to the recent spike in the price of cryptocurrencies and have determined they will gain more from paying their delinquent taxes and having the seizure released.

According to the government report, most tax fraud was committed using Bitcoin (19% of assets seized), followed by Ripple (16%), Ethereum (10%) and Stellar (9%).

That’s quite a feat for Ripple and Stellar then and it really proves again how popular they both are in Asia.

Photo by: Chickenonline