The price of bitcoin continues to fall as a report claimed that the U.S. Department of Justice has launched a criminal probe into Tether, the so-called “stablecoin” from cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex that’s primarily used to buy and sell bitcoin.

Fraud allegations regarding Tether are not new. In January it was reported that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission was looking into whether Tether, claimed to be pegged to the U.S. dollar, has U.S. dollars in reserve to back the value of it. Bitfinex claims that it does hold U.S. dollars in reserve, but others allege that it doesn’t.

Bloomberg claimed that the Justice Department has “recently homed in on suspicions that a tangled web involving Bitcoin, Tether and crypto exchange Bitfinex might have been used to illegally move prices.” The claim now, as it has been previously, is that Bitfinex issued Tethers at particular moments as part of a strategy to manipulate the price of bitcoin.

“A focus of the Justice Department’s investigation is whether the dramatic rise of digital tokens in recent years was purely driven by actual demand, or was partially fanned on by market tricks,” Bloomberg explained. “Along with the CFTC, prosecutors have been looking into a number of trading strategies, including spoofing — the illegal practice of flooding the market with fake orders to trick other traders into buying or selling.”

The news came on top of continuing cryptocurrency market chaos caused by an ongoing dispute over bitcoin spinoff Bitcoin Cash.

Bitcoin Cash split in two on Friday after a longstanding dispute between factions led by Roger Ver, aka “Bitcoin Jesus,” and Craig Wright, the Australian who once claimed he was bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto, over the future of the cryptocurrency.

While all that’s separate from bitcoin itself, the uncertainty caused by the conflict, combined with cryptocurrency miners putting their computing power toward supporting the different Bitcoin Cash factions, has caused the prices of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to plunge. Bitcoin, in particular, fell to a 19-month low on Monday.

Bitcoin was down almost 10 percent, to $4,366.32, as of 10:15 p.m. EST, down more than $500 from the same time yesterday and its lowest price since April 26, 2017. The red ink was once again shared across popular cryptocurrencies, with Ethereum dropping 13 percent, Litecoin 9 percent and Ripple XRP 11 percent.

Photo: Tom Mrazek/Wikimedia Commons