Complaints to CFPB About Crypto Rose During Market Shakeup

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has seen a surge in consumer complaints about cryptocurrency as the crypto market has turned more volatile.

That’s according to a Friday (Sept. 30) report from The Wall Street Journal, citing an analysis from Dynamic Securities Analytics (DSA) Inc., a compliance data firm.

The report says the CFPB received 2,734 confirmed complaints against digital-asset companies between Jan. 1, 2020, and Aug. 26 of this year, 1,800 of which arrived in 2022 alone.

The complaints were against a number of different companies, such as crypto firms like Binance, Gemini and Coinbase, as well as banks like JPMorgan, PNC and Wells Fargo.

See also: From White House, a Clear Call for Tighter Crypto Controls

The report comes amid strong indications that the U.S. Treasury Department is taking steps to rein in crypto.

Among those indicators: the trio of reports the department released on Sept. 16, and the Fact Sheet the White House issued announcing its goals for the first major responses to the president’s executive order calling for a legal framework for cryptocurrencies.

It encourages regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to “aggressively pursue investigations and enforcement actions against unlawful practices in the digital assets space.”

It also orders the CFPB and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to “redouble their efforts to monitor consumer complaints and to enforce against unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices.”

Learn more: Crypto Networks Connected to Increase in Reported Fraud

Earlier this year, DSA issued a report showing that federal law enforcement had seen a wave of suspicious activity from San Francisco financial firms, including some of the world’s top cryptocurrency trading platforms.

The Bay Area, home to many crypto companies, filed 206,527 suspicious activity reports (SARs) last year, DSA said.

That’s compared to 73,959 in 2020 and 14,845 in 2019. In all, these San Francisco money services businesses accounted for about one out of 15 of the nearly 3.1 million SARS reported around the country in 2021, the DSA report found.

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