Taiwan's FSC Takes Action Again! MaiCoin and Cointrust Each Fined 1.5 Million Taiwanese Coin for Violating Anti-Money Laundering Laws

The Financial Supervisory Commission of Taiwan today (26) announced two cases of companies being fined for violating the Anti-Money Laundering Act. The companies involved are MaiCoin and BitoEX Technology Corporation (BitoEX), both of which were fined 1.5 million New Taiwan Dollars.

According to the information released by the FSC, Modern Wealth has been found to have violated multiple Money Laundering prevention-related regulations due to failure to conduct customer due diligence and transaction monitoring in accordance with the regulations, as well as failure to timely report suspicious transaction reports.

The Financial Supervisory Commission found in the investigation:

Customer review oversight: Failure to conduct enhanced customer review in accordance with regulations.

Trading surveillance ineffective: suspicious transaction patterns disclosed by the FSC were not included in the monitoring, and corresponding thresholds were not set for different customer risk levels.

Incomplete record: Unable to accurately record customer transactions.

Suspected improper handling of transactions: Failure to investigate suspicious transactions and failure to report to relevant departments within the statutory deadline.

Another case involves the currency trust company. The FSC pointed out that the currency trust has multiple deficiencies in preventing Money Laundering and combating terrorist financing, including failure to identify the ultimate beneficial owners of corporate clients and ineffective monitoring of transactions of high-risk clients. The main violations include:

Inadequate review of high-risk customers: Failure to fully understand the business relationship between customers and the company, and failure to confirm the source of wealth of high-risk customers.

Insufficient transaction monitoring: Failure to thoroughly review customer transactions for compliance with their risk characteristics.

Recording loss: Unable to record complete transaction data.

Suspicious transaction processing missing: Some suspected Money Laundering or terrorist financing transactions have not triggered alerts or initiated investigations.

The FSC stated that the disciplinary actions against the two companies this time are to demonstrate the government’s determination to combat Money Laundering and terrorist financing, and to alert related Financial Institutions to strengthen internal controls to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. The FSC urges all Financial Institutions to review their internal mechanisms immediately to prevent similar situations from happening again.

Earlier, two other Taiwanese trading platforms, ACE exchange and Rybit, were fined NT$1.52 million and NT$1.02 million, respectively, for violating anti-money laundering laws, personal data protection laws, and other regulations. Rybit has suspended services to individual users and closed NT$ deposit.

<The Taiwan Financial Supervisory Commission makes another move! MaiCoin and BitoEX were fined 1.5 million Taiwanese dollars each for violating anti-money laundering laws.> This article was first published on ‘Blocktempo’.