Coinbase has been issued a $50 million penalty by regulators for breaching anti-money laundering laws. This is in addition to the company’s voluntarily committing to invest another $50 million in improving its compliance processes.
As cryptocurrencies become more popular, the potential for their use in illegal activities such as money laundering is getting a lot of attention from regulators around the world.
For example, the UK National Crime Agency has established a specialized unit to investigate such crimes.
Coinbase has accepted a total settlement of $100 million with regulators after it was discovered to have issues with complying with anti-money laundering regulations.
The company hired external consultants to address the issue, but the problems persisted and Coinbase was formally investigated in 2021.
According to The New York Times, Coinbase had an extensive backlog of over 100,000 alerts concerning potentially suspicious customer transactions that had not been sufficiently examined.
