Britain’s financial watchdog has significantly widened its scrutiny of the cryptocurrency industry this year, as the number of companies being investigated has risen by 74%.
According to data published by Pinsent Masons, the UK law firm, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) was actively pursuing 87 investigations by the end of September 2019, up from the 50 cases in October 2018.
No-Nonsense Approach
The FCA reported in late May that more than £27 million ($33.3 million) had been lost to scams and fraudulent cryptocurrency investments in 2018/19.
Davi Heffron, partner at Pinsent Masons, told the Financial Times that the rise in investigations “reflects the FCA’s increasingly hands-on and no-nonsense approach to enforcing the law in the cryptocurrency market”. He added:
For cryptocurrency businesses acting lawfully these statistics will be encouraging – they want bad actors pushed out.
Featured image via Pixabay.
