(EFE).- The United States Department of the Treasury announced this Monday that the American company Poloniex, a cryptocurrency trading company, has agreed to pay 7.6 million dollars to close a case of alleged violation of US sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Crimea and Syria.
The Treasury statement noted that between January 2014 and November 2019 the platform allowed customers apparently located in those sanctioned jurisdictions to carry out transactions for a combined value of $15.3 million.
The agreement that Poloniex has reached with the Treasury Department’s Office of Asset Control (OFAC) considered that the agreed figure reflects that the alleged violations committed, 65,942 in total, “apparently were not disclosed voluntarily and were not notorious” .
Although Poloniex attempted to identify and restrict accounts with a nexus to Iran, Cuba, Sudan, Crimea, and Syria, clients located there continued to use the platform to engage in digital activities.
Treasury noted that while Poloniex attempted to identify and restrict accounts with a nexus to Iran, Cuba, Sudan, Crimea and Syria, customers located there continued to use the platform to engage in online digital activities.
Poloniex introduced controls in late 2017 that substantially reduced the level of apparent violations, but there were a number of accounts opened by individuals located in Crimea, a territory annexed by Russia in 2014, that remained active in 2018 and 2019.
The maximum fine the company faced could have been as high as $99.2 million, but Treasury put it at $7.6 million because those alleged rulings were not “notorious.”
The Treasury did point out, however, that the company had means of knowing that the users implicated in these apparent violations were in sanctioned jurisdictions thanks to their physical address data and their IP, the number that identifies a device within a network.
It added that while Poloniex did implement a sanctions compliance program, it did not consistently carry it out in those jurisdictions or on accounts that existed before it went live.
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