Crypto currencies (symbol image) – Released in the public domain by unsplash.com Old Money
The European Union should soon oblige crypto exchanges to collect information about their customers, it goes according to the EU countries. This is to ensure the traceability of crypto money, it said in a yesterday adopted Council negotiating mandate. The regulations are likely to make the use of anonymous wallets much more difficult.
In the summer, the EU Commission had one Legislative package against financial crime submitted. The aim is to be able to better identify suspicious transactions and, if necessary, block them in the fight against money laundering and organized crime. The EU states agreed on a common position on Wednesday yesterday. In this, the Council of Member States calls for an obligation to register transfers between crypto exchanges and so-called “unhosted wallets”. These are anonymous virtual wallets that allow access to a crypto currency and are not managed by a service provider that requires registration.
EU countries want to close “gaps in the financial system”
There is an “urgent need” of the EU states to make transactions in cryptocurrency more traceable. “Today’s agreement is an important step towards closing the loopholes in our financial systems that are maliciously used by criminals to launder illegal profits or to finance terrorist activities,” said Slovenia’s Finance Minister Andrej Šircelj, whose country is currently chairing the EU Council leads.
In the past few months, the number of ransomware attacks, such as from the current situation report of the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). The blackmailers almost always insist on payments in crypto currencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Concern about blackmail attacks is also growing in the USA: Around 5.2 billion dollars in payments could be attributed to the ten most common ransomware variants alone, estimates a report by the US Treasury Department. The US government is therefore planning sanctions against ransomware profiteers and – like the EU – new statutory transparency requirements for cryptocurrency exchanges, reports the Wall Street Journal. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin anyway not, however, increase the workload for investigative authorities considerably.
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