The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has proposed a ban on retail cryptocurrency sales.
The FCA explained that the products are a risk to consumers because cryptos’ value and risks cannot be reliably assessed due to extreme volatility, market abuse and financial crime, among other reasons. As a result, the FCA is consulting on banning the sale, marketing and distribution to all retail consumers of all derivatives, and estimates that the potential benefit to these customers will be between £75 million ($94 million USD) to £234.3 million a year.
“As with our work on the wider [contract for difference (CFD)] and binary options markets, we will act when we see poor products being sold to retail consumers. These are complex contracts built on top of complex assets,” said FCA Executive Director of Strategy & Competition Christopher Woolard in a press release. “Most consumers cannot reliably value derivatives based on unregulated crypto assets. Prices are extremely volatile, and as we have seen globally, financial crime in crypto asset markets can lead to sudden and unexpected losses. It is, therefore, clear to us that these derivatives and exchange traded notes are unsuitable investments for retail consumers.”
Blockchain advisory firm AmaZix revealed that it is allowing access to its “moderation bot” to help prevent crypto scams on messaging app Telegram.
Using data collected over two years, AmaZix said it has found 730,000 Telegram users, with over 54,500 (7.5 percent) banned for attempting some type of crypto scam, including impersonating admins, posting fake offers or giveaways, posting links for cloned social media or other websites, and phishing group users.
“Through our service, which takes the form of a bot that is added to a group, we offer free, real-time threat intelligence for Telegram. As soon as a user posts malicious content on any of the groups we monitor, they are automatically banned from all our groups, and added to our global blacklist,” said AmaZix Executive Chairman and Founder Jonas Karlberg, according to CoinDesk.