Paris, 7 December 2018 - The United Kingdom has a well-developed and robust regime to effectively combat money laundering and terrorist financing. However, it needs to strengthen its supervision, and increase the resources of its financial intelligence unit.

The FATF has conducted an assessment of the United Kingdom’s anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing (AML/CFT) system. The assessment is a comprehensive review of the effectiveness of the UK’s measures and their level of compliance with the FATF Recommendations.

The UK is the largest financial services provider in the world. As a result of the exceptionally large volume of funds that flows through its financial sector, the country also faces a significant risk that some of these funds have links to crime and terrorism.  This is reflected in the country’s strong understanding of these risks, as well as national AML/CFT policies, strategies and proactive initiatives to address them.

The UK aggressively pursues money laundering and terrorist financing investigations and prosecutions, achieving 1400 convictions each year for money laundering. UK law enforcement authorities have powerful tools to obtain beneficial ownership and other information, including through effective public-private partnerships, and make good use of this information in their investigations. However, the UK financial intelligence unit needs a substantial increase in its resources and the suspicious activity reporting regime needs to be modernised and reformed.

The country is a global leader in promoting corporate transparency and it is using the results of its risk assessment to further strengthen the reporting and registration of corporate structures. Financial institutions as well as all designated non-financial businesses and professions such as lawyers, accountants and real estate agents are subject to comprehensive AML/CFT requirements. Strong features of the system include the outreach activities conducted by supervisors and the measures to prevent criminals or their associates from being professionally accredited or controlling a financial institution. However, the intensity of supervision is not consistent across all of these sectors and UK needs to ensure that supervision of all entities is fully in line with the significant risks the UK faces.

The UK has been highly effective in investigating, prosecuting and convicting a range of terrorist financing activity and has taken a leading role in designating terrorists at the UN and EU level.  The UK is also promoting global implementation of proliferation-related targeted financial sanctions, as well as achieving a high level of effectiveness in implementing targeted financial sanctions domestically.

The UK’s overall AML/CFT regime is effective in many respects. It needs to address certain areas of weakness, such as supervision and the reporting and investigation of suspicious transactions.  However, the country has demonstrated a robust level of understanding of its risks, a range of proactive measures and initiatives to counter the significant risks identified and plays a leading role in promoting global effective implementation of AML/CFT measures.

FATF adopted this report at its Plenary meeting in October 2018...

Source: FATF-GAFI.ORG - Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

The Belgian Financial Services and Markets Authority (FSMA) has updated their ongoing list of businesses reported to operate cryptocurrency scams. With this most recent addition of 14 websites the “blockchain blacklist” has now expanded to 113 websites to avoid.

The FSMA has been updating their blacklist throughout 2018. In March, the Brussels Times reported that Belgian tax authorities had started hunting for cryptocurrency investors. “Anyone speculating on the cryptocurrency market must pay tax of 33% on gains made, and declare these within the section ‘miscellaneous income’ on their tax return,” the Times reported.

Despite warnings from the FSMA consumers continue to log complaints regarding fraudulent activity on cryptocurrency exchanges. The FMSA has warned consumers to look out for various red flags. FSMA warns...

Source: Bitcoin, Ethereum and Blockchain News | CryptoGlobe.

The leading information security portal SecurityLab.ru has published a note: CipherTrace - audit trail encryption (2018/12/16).

For the first 9 months of 2018, theft in the cryptocurrency industry reached about $ 1 billion...

The October report by CipherTrace shows that the criminals used bitcoin to launder $ 2.5 billion of dirty money. Thus, 380 000 BTC was laundered on cryptocurrency exchanges.

A new study showed that 97% of criminal bitcoins flow into unregulated cryptocurrency exchanges.

Bitcoin's anonymity is a stumbling block for many, almost from the day it appeared. Despite the fact that a number of politicians and experts consider the first digital money to be completely anonymous, yet this is not true. To make a bitcoin transaction, you do not need personal data and the user's address, but information about all operations remains in the public distributed registry. This may allow you to track cash flow.

There are measures that can increase the anonymity of translations. For these purposes, services have been developed - cryptocurrency mixers. For example, you can convert Bitcoin to other cryptocurrencies, and then back. However, even such methods do not make the first cryptocurrency completely confidential. Both the sender and receiver can still be calculated.

It is noteworthy that at the moment, many state and commercial companies have attended to the identification of users. They make a lot of effort to master the methods of computing the identities of those who make suspicious transfers. Therefore, it’s impossible to talk about complete anonymity on the Bitcoin network...

Source: SecurityLab.ru

Source: K4Y0T Project.

Blockchain, a revolutionary basis for decentralized online transactions, carries security risks. Learn about current security problems and specific incidents within blockchain implementations, and the techniques, targets, and malware used for attacks.

What spiked the movement, starting in fall 2017, toward cryptojacking? The first reason is the value of cryptocurrency. If attacker can steal Bitcoins, for example, from a victim’s system, that’s enough. If direct theft is not possible, why not mine coins using a large number of hijacked systems. There’s no need to pay for hardware, electricity, or CPU cycles; it’s an easy way for criminals to earn money. We once thought that CPUs in routers and video-recording devices were useless for mining, but default or missing passwords wipe away this view. If an attacker can hijack enough systems, mining in high volume can be profitable. Not only individuals struggle with protecting against these attacks; companies suffer from them as well...

Source: Securing Tomorrow. Today. | McAfee Blogs.