The European Commission has a plan to end crypto anonymity by establishing an anti-money laundering agency that will enforce tougher rules to crack down on the criminal proceedings.
Maireád McGuinness, the financial services commissioner, launched proposals in which he aim to improve the suspicious activities and transactions’ detection and close loopholes often used by criminals for financing terrorist activities and laundering illicit proceeds through the financial system.
Money laundering is a big problem in the European Union. Europol gave an estimate that about 1% of the economic activity in the EU involve suspicious transactions. This proposal for tightening money-laundering safeguards comes amid the pressure to increase enforcement after a lot of countries started their investigation against Danish multinational Danske bank. This was afer it was brought to light that over €200 billion was passed in suspicious transactions through their Estonian subsidiary between the years of 2007 to 2015.
As per the new plan, the existing anti-money laundering regulations will be extended to be applied to the crypto sector financial services. This will require all the cryptocurrency service providers to verify identity of users sending and receiving transactions. Apart from this, under the plan, anonymous crypto asset assets are prohibited which will ban cash payments of over €10,000.
People who are involved with cryptocurrencies will realize that now, anonymity is gone. The crypto service providers will be verifying the identity of all the owners of virtual assets as well as senders and receivers of transactions. Through this, they will be able to track all suspicious transactions. These tules are bring to ensure that the crypto sector is in line with the financial industry.
