The Brazilian government has decided to send an inquiry to the country’s top crypto exchanges in an attempt to understand more of their business and understand the potential of money laundering involved in these companies.
A local news outlet, Portal do Bitcoin, affirms that the government has been sending a 14-point questionnaire to a group of exchanges in the last two weeks. The document is sent under the name of Brazil’s Ministry of Finance. The document is also signed by the prosecutor Ana Paula Bez Batti and it warns the exchanges that they have the period of five days to reply to the questionnaire.
According to the reports, the answers will be used in a private dossier which will be used to protect the Brazilian financial system.
The questionnaire cannot be legally shared, but reports indicate that the 14 questions revolve around the operations of the exchanges, like how some of them address the checking of the documents, trading limits according to earnings and how they are able to control operations on the platform, identify users, etc.
Some other questions are about the wallets’ hashes and data from the exchange operators to study and combat corruption and money laundering. For instance, question 13 asks about any type of system that can be used to block tokens with a history linked to thefts, illicit markets and other criminal activities.
Portal do Bitcoin was contacted by three of the Top 10 largest exchanges in the country about the questionnaire. One company stated that it answered the questionnaire, while the other one stated that it did not receive it. A third exchange claimed that it would not reply. This exchange decided that, as the document was not an official document and was sent to its contact form, they would not answer it.
The movement from the Ministry of Finance happens shortly after Atlas, a top Brazilian crypto exchange, was hacked. While the funds of the users remained safe, the data of over 264,000 users was stolen, including their email addresses and how much BTC they deposited on the platform before the attack.
Atlas claims to let its users take advantage of trading via a bot and pays them for making deposits in a similar way as many platforms did over the world (many of them were scams, though).
