Major Australian bank to decline ‘certain’ payments to crypto exchanges

The Commonwealth Bank (CBA), the biggest bank in Australia, has declared it will not process or suspend certain payments to cryptocurrency exchanges due to the possibility of fraud.

The action follows two leading international exchanges being sued by the US securities authority and is just a few weeks after another large Australian bank, Westpac, prohibited its customers from dealing with cryptocurrency exchange Binance.

On June 8, CBA announced that it would reject or temporarily suspend “certain payments to cryptocurrency exchanges” in an effort to “safeguard customers from potential fraud risks associated with making certain payments to cryptocurrency exchanges.”

A CBA representative informed Cointelegraph that, at present, they are not disclosing further details to the public or to customers concerning the payment types they will block or retain due to the danger of fraudsters getting around the alterations.

The bank declared that in the upcoming months, they will be implementing a limit of $10,000 Australian dollars (equivalent to $6,650) per month for customers sending funds to crypto exchanges to purchase cryptocurrencies.

“Beginning today, CBA will suspend or postpone certain payments to cryptocurrency exchanges for a duration of 24 hours. In the following months, the Bank will also establish a $10,000 limit per month for payments made to exchanges for the purchase of cryptocurrencies,” it declared.

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James Roberts, the General Manager of Fraud Management Services at CBA, asserted that “fraudsters all over the world are taking advantage” of the high interest in cryptocurrency, pretending to be “genuine investment options or transferring money into crypto exchanges”.

The bank declared that the measure would be “under continuous scrutiny,” and they would observe the effects of the measures.

The bank has made a drastic change in its stance, considering that only about a year and a half ago in November 2021, it was planning to offer crypto trading services to the millions of users of its CommBank app.

At the time, the CEO of the bank, Matt Comyn, declared that they saw “risks in participating, but bigger risks in not participating” and further commented, “the sector and the technology are not going away anytime soon.”

As recently as May 2022, Comyn was in disagreement with regulators concerning the introduction of the product. Nevertheless, the financial regulators of the nation prevailed and the trial of the crypto-trading product was suspended.

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