India’s Financial Intelligence Unit, an agency that monitors and regulates suspicious financial activities, has issued compliance notices to nine foreign cryptocurrency exchanges and asked the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to block their websites in the country.
Affected exchanges include Binance, Kucoin, Huobi, Kraken, Gate.io, Bittrex, Bitstamp, MEXC Global, and Bitfinex. The FIU said in a statement that they were operating illegally without complying with the provisions of the Anti-Money Laundering Act.
notice
“Providing virtual digital asset services operating in India (both offshore and domestic) and engaging in activities such as exchange between virtual digital assets and fiat currencies, transfer of virtual digital assets, storage or management of virtual digital assets or instruments that enable their control; “All information on the virtual digital assets of the entity (VDA SP) must be registered with the FIU IND as a reporting entity and comply with a set of obligations laid down under the Anti-Money Laundering Act 2002,” the statement said.
“This obligation is activity-based and is not conditional on physical presence in India,” the statement added. “This regulation prescribes reporting, record-keeping and other obligations for VDA SPs under the PML Act, which also includes FIU IND registration.”
The FIU said 31 providers had registered with the agency, but no foreign companies “target a significant portion of Indian users”.
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About the author
MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020, joining just before Bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for publications covering all cryptocurrency-related news, preferring NFTs, metaverse, web3 games, fundraising, crime, hacking, and cryptocurrency ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. X You can follow MK at @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.