By Canada: the city of Vancouver recently announced it is considering a ban on bitcoin (BTC) automated teller machines (ATMs) as a result of money laundering issues.
Kennedy Steward, the mayor of Vancouver, has reportedly called for a blanket ban on bitcoin ATM’s in light of an increase in money laundering cases. A police report cited by an online publication, the Next Web argued that criminals can purchase bitcoin funds in order to facilitate malicious needs for a few thousand dollars and then deposit their cash into that ATM as many times as required to profit from or bypass transaction fees.
Notably, authorities claim that they expect as many as 840 reports related to digital currencies this year, which is triple the amount of reported last years. Which the cities of Richmond and Vancouver councils have already pushed for this action, the province of British Columbia has decided to investigate further first by holding a money-laundering inquiry.
As per CoinATMRadar, an industry monitoring site, there is currently 694 crypto ATM’s in Canada, with 76 of them in Vancouver.
Just last month, in Spain, as many as eight people were nabbed for allegedly laundering funds by exchanging fiat currency into crypto assets. The suspects apparently used crypto ATM’s and split funds into smaller amounts to inject them into the financial infrastructure with having any transactions flagged as suspicious.
Back in January, U.S based bitcoin ATM operator Coinmen, which was the first bitcoin ATM operator to receive a license in the nation back in 2014, joined forces with Coinstar to sell BTC at coin-counting kiosks.
Comments