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The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is considering enforcement action against unregistered Bitcoin ATMs in parts of England.
According to the regulator’s notice, it received intelligence from Leeds Police, which identified unregistered Bitcoin ATMs operating in the city. Cease and desist letters have been sent to ATM operators and the FCA is considering further enforcement action.
This is not a surprise at all. In March 2022, the FCA announced that it had not received any registration applications from Bitcoin ATM providers to operate under the UK’s Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) regime, and that it considered all crypto kiosks in the UK to be unregistered and work illegally.
It was the right call by the FCA and West Yorkshire Police to crack down on these unregistered kiosks, but it’s sad to see it come to this. Unfortunately, such actions tend to lead people to assume that all Bitcoin ATM operators are bad, when in fact there are valuable crypto ATM businesses like those participating in the Cryptocurrency Compliance Cooperative that are committed to regulatory compliance. Still, it’s sad to see certain bad apples threatening to give the entire industry a bad name.
For more information on the typologies of financial crime involving Bitcoin ATMs and compliance approaches to address them, see Elliptic’s “Preventing Financial Crime in Cryptoassets: 2022 Typologies Report.”
Keep an eye out for the next installment of the typologies report, which will be published later in the spring.
Law Enforcement Regulators and Government EMEA
