Cryptocurrency Needs To Improve Protocols To Prevent Money Laundering In UK, Says FATF

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is the financial security body that handles regulatory measures surrounding cryptocurrency. In a recent demand, they’ve set their sights on the United Kingdom and their need to improve the monitoring of cryptocurrency. Based on the December 7th report, their main focus needs to be on preventing money laundering, while protecting the country against terrorist financing.

Based on the evaluation of the current AML and CFT efforts in the UK, the FATF specifically noted that there’s a need to give their protocols a “significant overhaul.” It also focused on other sectors of the economy, like real estate agents and high value dealers, that lack “understanding of their risks” involving money laundering with cryptocurrency, and they don’t know “how to effectively mitigate them.

The report notes,

“Virtual currency exchange providers are not yet covered by AML/CFT requirements. This is an emerging risk and there is not yet evidence to suggest that broad scale ML/TF is occurring in the UK through this relatively small sector.”

Presently, there’s a major regulatory shift happening in the UK, as the country debates on the best way to deal with the domestic crypto industry. There’s been plenty of work done in these areas, though the results have elicited mixed reviews. The public has been incredibly unhappy with the possibility of Bitcoin futures being blacklisted.

So far, the FATF has examined the way that local authorities have “identified and assessed the risks associated with new payment methods,” and are now “preparing regulations to extend AML/CFT requirements to this sector.” Part of the recommendations that they made were for the U.K. to “progress plans to extend AML/CFT requirements and related supervision to virtual currency exchange providers.”

The FATF has been in effect since 1989, after being created by the G7 for research on money laundering. It wasn’t until September 11th, 2001 that they started to examine terrorism financing as well. Presently, the group includes 37 countries as members, though there’s also outlaw countries listed.

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