U.S. Treasury officials are preparing to brief lawmakers on the growing threats that cryptocurrency regulations represent to established banking systems.
Brian Nelson, the Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the Treasury, was going to explain the agency’s worries about the use of virtual assets in illegal financial transactions in his prepared statement before the House Financial Services Committee.
The exploitation of virtual assets for all forms of criminal financial activity is a major issue for the Treasury, according to Nelson. “We have been establishing an anti-money-laundering and counter-financing-of-terrorism (AML/CFT) framework for digital assets for more than ten years now, with the goal of reducing the dangers associated with illegal financing while simultaneously encouraging ethical innovation.”
Nelson claims that the Terrorism and Financial Intelligence team has been keeping tabs on the methods that criminal organizations use to make and send funds.
While there are increasingly well-established methods for terrorists to transfer funds, “we continue to evaluate that their usage of digital assets remains a tiny proportion,” Nelson said. “It has come to our attention that terrorist organizations have used and may use digital assets as a means to launder, transmit, and keep their unlawful funds.”
“Such as our recent multilateral action against many of Hamas’s funding networks that depended on numerous important exchanges to route earnings to the organization,” Nelson said, demonstrating the unit’s concentrated focus on Hamas-related actions.
The Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2023 (DAAMLA), launched by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, has sparked heated controversy among crypto enthusiasts.
The measure, which sought to tighten restrictions around the use of digital assets in criminal financing, garnered the backing of 19 more senators who served as co-sponsors.
