CoinList agrees to $1.2M settlement over apparent US sanctions violations.

CoinList, a US-based cryptocurrency exchange, has agreed to a $1.2 million settlement with the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) alleging that the company facilitated transactions in apparent sanctions violations.

In a Dec. 13 announcement, OFAC CoinList processed 989 transactions for users in Crimea — a peninsula formerly part of Ukraine now occupied by Russia — from April 2020 to May 2022. According to OFAC, apparent sanctions violations are nothing but “voluntary self-disclosure.”

“[CoinList’s] “The screening process failed to capture users who identified themselves as residents of an unbanned country but gave an address in Crimea,” Ofco said. “In particular, [CoinList] They opened 89 accounts for their customers, almost all of whom stated ‘Russia' as their country of residence, but all of them gave addresses in Crimea when the accounts were opened.

Ofco said CoinList “knew or had reason to know” that the transactions were likely to residents of Crimea, violating US sanctions and benefiting the region economically. However, the exchange has cooperated with US authorities, and the number of transactions that appear to violate sanctions represents a “very small percentage” of the exchange's total volume.

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In the year In 2014, Russian forces occupied Crimea, which until then was part of Ukraine. US President Barack Obama imposed sanctions on the region following the invasion, before further sanctions were imposed on Russia in February 2022 when the country's military invaded Ukraine.

Other US crypto companies have faced similar enforcement actions by OFAC since the sanctions were first imposed. In May, Poloniex agreed to a $7.6 million settlement related to more than 65,000 apparent violations of multiple sanctions, including those in Crimea. Binance has filed a $4.3 billion lawsuit with US authorities for money laundering and wiretapping, which also includes sanctions violations.

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