Binance Australia Banned By Big Four Bank Westpac: Report

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Aus­tralian big four bank West­pac has banned its cus­tomers from trans­act­ing with Binance, as part of a suite of scam pro­tec­tion mea­sures. The devel­op­ment comes amidst mount­ing pres­sure on the cryp­to giant’s oper­a­tions in the country.

In a state­ment, West­pac revealed that it was block­ing a num­ber of cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchanges as part of a tri­al. Its data uncov­ered invest­ment frauds account­ed for about half of all such loss­es, and a third of all scam pay­ments were trans­ferred direct­ly to cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchanges.

Clamping Down Scams

Despite not nam­ing Binance explic­it­ly, it is under­stood its Aus­tralian arm exchange has been hit with the ban. Com­ment­ing on the move Scott Col­lary, Westpac’s group exec­u­tive of cus­tomer ser­vices and tech­nol­o­gy, said,

“Dig­i­tal exchanges have a legit­i­mate role to play in the finan­cial ecosys­tem. But since the rise of dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy, we’ve noticed that scam­mers are increas­ing­ly using over­seas exchanges. Often our cus­tomers only dis­cov­er they’ve been scammed after the mon­ey has left the coun­try, mak­ing recov­ery extreme­ly dif­fi­cult. The tri­al of our new secu­ri­ty mea­sures will bet­ter pro­tect cus­tomers from scams.”

Col­lary also said the move could help the bank save mil­lions lost to scams. The ban on cryp­to exchanges is report­ed to be rolled out as a phased tri­al in the com­ing weeks.

Binance Aus­tralia being kicked off by a major Aus­tralian pay­ments ser­vice is yet anoth­er blow for the cryp­to exchange, which has already been fac­ing severe reg­u­la­to­ry scruti­ny in the Unit­ed States.

The West­pac ban comes on the same day that Binance Aus­tralia issued an update say­ing it will no longer be able to facil­i­tate Aus­tralian Dol­lar bank trans­fers via PayID, a pop­u­lar instant pay­ment method. The cryp­to exchange blamed its third-par­ty pay­ment ser­vice provider while adding it’s look­ing for an alternative.

Binance’s Setback in Australia

Last month, Binance announced the shut­ting down of Binance Aus­tralia Deriv­a­tives busi­ness, cit­ing the recent engage­ment with the Aus­tralian Secu­ri­ties and Invest­ments Com­mis­sion (ASIC). The lat­ter had can­celed the Aus­tralian finan­cial ser­vices license held by Oztures Trad­ing Pty Ltd trad­ing as Binance Aus­tralia Deriv­a­tives in response to Binance request­ing the action.

Pri­or to the license can­cel­la­tion, the ASIC had also found that Binance incor­rect­ly clas­si­fied hun­dreds of retail cus­tomers as whole­sale investors, which prompt­ed the finan­cial reg­u­la­tor to con­duct a tar­get­ted review of the company.

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