US FinCEN Is Getting Nervous About Cryptocurrencies In The Betting Industry

On Tuesday this week, the United States Financial Crimes Enforcement Network held the annual meeting with gambling operators about the compliance with the country’s AML laws.

In general, the whole meeting went towards talking about cryptocurrencies slowly finding their way into the industry and allowing operators to disregard any and all pre-installed measurements for preventing money laundering. The director of FinCEN, Kenneth BLANCO referred to cryptos as convertible virtual currencies (CVC), and mentioned that the level of AML compliance regarding these payment methods is not up to standards.

More specifically, Blanco claimed that any and all betting operators, be they online or offline need to use any resource possible to guarantee 100% implementation of AML laws. This includes reporting any type of suspicious activity by the players.

Gaming market experts such as Casinoreviewer have mentioned that applying the AML laws to cryptocurrencies is going to be extremely difficult for operators as they’ll be forced to implement new blockchain systems that warrant additional costs. And even if they did implement the blockchain system, it’s never guaranteed that they’ll be able to trace outbound transactions.

Seeing FinCEN put more pressure on operators to govern their crypto sphere much better could force the industry to shy away from allowing these methods anymore and only accepting inbound transactions.

Image courtesy of Cryptobettor