On Monday, October 10, the U.S. Department of the Treasury launched a lawsuit against the Bittrex cryptocurrency exchange to facilitate illicit finance. As a result, Bittrex agreed to pay $29.3 million to end the charges.

The US Department of the Treasury accused the Bittrex platform of breaching some of its financial sanctions and anti-trafficking obligations money laundering. He must pay $3.3 million to the Office for the Control of Foreign Assets (OFAC) for not preventing individuals based in Crimea (a Ukrainian region annexed by Russia), Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria, from using its services. Indeed, between March 2014 and December 2017, persons normally prohibited from having financial interactions with American entities under American sanctions programs, carried out cryptocurrency transactions worth more than 263 million dollars.

According to the department, “Bittrex had reason to know that these users were in sanctioned jurisdictions.”