Belgian FSMA Expands Crypto Scam List

The financial regulator of Belgium, the Financial Services and Markets Authority has recently expanded its list of potential cryptocurrency scam domains. The list was increased to 131 websites after the regulator added 9 domains on Thursday, October 31st.

The changes were made after the FSMA received numerous complaints and reports from the local crypto community that their investments had vanished from several crypto websites.

The FSMA also referred to their warnings in the past to avoid such websites. The fact is that they didn’t even have to formulate the warning again because the scams were identical to the ones warned about in the past. Things such as promises of great wealth with minimal investments and no knowledge about cryptocurrencies tend to always lead to the same result, thus the FSMA simply doubled down on warnings.

The only issue that the FSMA seems to be facing is the lack of authority to blacklist these websites. According to Belgian law, a government agency simply suspecting an entity of fraud does not give it the authority to bring it down without an investigation.

Unfortunately, finding the people behind these websites is extremely hard, thus leaving them active and forcing the FSMA to resort to just warnings rather than deliberate action.