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Archive » May 2022 » Crypto-assets and combating money laundering and terrorist financing

Crypto-assets and combating money laundering and terrorist financing

Roberto Ferretti, Paolo Roberto Amendola, Giacomo Maggio
May 2022 - n. 5
Keywords: Cripto-attività, antiriciclaggio, normativa
Jel codes: E51, G23, K39, K42

Crypto-assets can also be used for illicit purposes and, in particular, for money laundering and terrorist financing. In order to combat this phenomenon, the European legislator has extended the scope of anti-money laundering provisions to crypto-assets. When transposing the new European Aml rules, the Italian legislator has introduced a restriction of activity not provided for by the European directives and imposed on all virtual currency service providers an obligation to register in a special section of the Register of moneychangers kept by the Italian Body of Financial Agents and Credit Brokers (Oam). The new Italian regulations will have to be amended following the approval of the MiCa regulation – which provides for a different licensing regime for crypto-asset service providers – and the anti-money laundering regulations proposed by the Commission in July 2021 as part of the Aml package. All these regulations will only apply to crypto-asset service providers (and mainly to exchanges and custodians) and not to private individuals performing peer-to-peer crypto-asset transactions on fully decentralised networks. In this case, the prevention and combating of criminal phenomena will require the aid of technical tools, such as blockchain forensics.

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