The watchdogs of global money laundering state that their crypto monitoring routine remains the same. Despite the recent developments in the crypto sector, the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) attitude towards crypto monitoring remains unchanged. This means that this task force is not planning to conduct annual compliance checks to increase the chances of adding countries to the “gray list.”
This statement came after Al Jazeera made a report claiming that the intergovernmental organization made some changes regarding crypto monitoring. According to Al Jazeera, the FATF currently conducts these evaluations every 10 years and plans to change the frequency of the assessments. This news agency claims that the Financial Action Task Force is preparing to conduct annual compliance checks. Well, that seems to not be true. The Financial Action Task Force usually makes evaluations throughout 5-year cycles and does not plan to change that in the near future.
“This Recommendation continues to be assessed and rated as part of countries’ mutual evaluation or follow up report,”
Financial Action Task Force’s Press Team
The war against fraudulent usage of cryptocurrency has been going on for more than a decade. Since Bitcoin first made an appearance, international structures began working on frameworks to stop criminal activity around it. Since 2018, international organizations have been tirelessly working toward providing a clear framework of guidelines for crypto projects. These guidelines are supposedly going to be used by crypto projects to help the international body combat money laundering and funding terrorist groups. Three years after, the FATF updated its framework. Nevertheless, according to their statistics, half of the world doesn’t require crypto service providers to implement a proper KYC procedure.
FATF’s Crypto Standards Implementation on a Global Scale
The Financial Action Task Force is aware of its extremely poor implementation of standards to regulate crypto. They even acknowledged this fact in an email sent to Coindesk. Nevertheless, their inefficiency in that aspect does not justify a change in the process of evaluation. Annual checks are not done to rate countries based on their performance to implement international standards but rather to provide a bigger picture of global compliance; even in regards to crypto. Other than cryptocurrencies, the FATF is doing great in anti money laundering (AML) and combatting the financing of terrorism (CFT) in every other sector.