Seattle crypto exchange Bittrex faces record fine for violating U.S. sanctions

Please fol­low and like us:
Pin Share

Seat­tle-based cryp­to exchange Bit­trex was fined $24 mil­lion by U.S. author­i­ties on Tues­day for help­ing clients evade U.S. sanc­tions in places such as Syr­ia, Iran and Crimea. 

It is the largest penal­ty ever levied against a cryp­to cur­ren­cy exchange by the Office of For­eign Assets Con­trol, the agency said. 

The Trea­sury Depart­ment said that Bit­trex allowed cus­tomers in Cuba, Syr­ia, Iran, Sudan and the dis­put­ed region of Crimea to trade approx­i­mate­ly $263.5 mil­lion worth of dig­i­tal cur­ren­cies between 2014 and 2017. In its state­ment, the U.S. said that Bit­trex should have been aware these cus­tomers were in sanc­tioned parts of the world due to their phys­i­cal address­es as well as their IP addresses. 

In one case, a cus­tomer in Iran gave a phys­i­cal address in Iran and uploaded an Iran­ian pass­port to ver­i­fy identification. 

“When vir­tu­al cur­ren­cy firms fail to imple­ment effec­tive sanc­tions com­pli­ance con­trols, includ­ing screen­ing cus­tomers locat­ed in sanc­tioned juris­dic­tions, they can become a vehi­cle for illic­it actors that threat­en U.S. nation­al secu­ri­ty,” said OFAC Direc­tor Andrea Gac­ki in a statement. 

The sanc­tions vio­la­tions were quite exten­sive, with OFAC find­ing 116,421 appar­ent vio­la­tions of U.S. sanc­tions pro­grams over the three years. The com­pa­ny did not appar­ent­ly have any inter­nal con­trols in place for sanc­tions until Octo­ber 2017.

Bit­trex, which lists an address in down­town Seattle’s Colum­bia Cen­ter tow­er, said it was “pleased” to set­tle these charges with U.S. author­i­ties, and not­ed that reg­u­la­tors were not ask­ing for Bit­trex to make any addi­tion­al changes to its anti-mon­ey laun­der­ing sys­tems, which had been updat­ed after 2018. 

Source link

Please fol­low and like us:
Pin Share

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *