On October 11, 2022, FinCEN and OFAC announced in separate press releases that they have taken action against Brittex, Inc., a virtual asset service provider, for willful violations of the BSA and for or apparent violations of sanctions against Cuba, Ukraine-related, Iran, Sudan, and Syria. FinCEN assessed a total of $29,280,829.20 civil money penalty against Brittex, $24,280,829.20 of which will be remitted to OFAC.
According to FinCEN Acting Director Himamauli Das, Bittrex’s AML program and SAR reporting failures unnecessarily exposed the U.S. financial system to threat actors and high-risk counterparties, such as sanctioned jurisdictions, darknet markets, and ransomware attackers. In its investigation, FinCEN found that Brittex:
Failed to maintain an effective AML program from February 2014 through December 2018;
Failed to implement effective transaction monitoring on its trading platform and relying on as few as two employees with minimal anti-money laundering training and experience to manually review all of the transactions for suspicious activity;
Conducted over 116,000 transactions valued at over $260 million with entities and individuals located in jurisdictions subject to comprehensive OFAC sanctions; and
Failed to file any SARs between February 2014 and May 2017.
FinCEN’s press release can be found here.
The OFAC’s announcement can be found here.