Crypto complaints rise amid market shakeup
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has seen an increase in consumer complaints about cryptocurrency as the crypto market has become more volatile.
That’s according to a Friday (Sept. 30) report from The Wall Street Journal, which cites an analysis by Dynamic Securities Analytics (DSA) Inc., a compliance data firm.
The report says the CFPB received 2,734 confirmed complaints against digital asset companies between January 1, 2020 and August 26 of this year, with 1,800 of those coming in 2022 alone.
The complaints were against a number of different companies, such as crypto firms such as Binance, Gemini and Coinbase, as well as banks such as JPMorgan, PNC and Wells Fargo.
See also: From the White House, a clear call for stricter crypto controls
The report comes amid strong indications that the US Treasury Department is taking steps to rein in crypto.
Among those indicators: the trio of reports the department released on September 16, and the fact sheet the White House released announcing its goals for the first major responses to the president’s executive order calling for a legal framework for cryptocurrencies.
It calls on regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to “aggressively pursue investigations and enforcement actions against illegal practices in the digital asset space.”
It also orders the CFPB and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to “redouble their efforts to monitor consumer complaints and to enforce against unfair, deceptive or abusive practices.”
Learn more: Crypto networks linked to rise in reported fraud
Earlier this year, the DSA released a report showing that federal law enforcement had seen a wave of suspicious activity from financial firms in San Francisco, including some of the world’s top cryptocurrency trading platforms.
The Bay Area, home to many crypto companies, filed 206,527 suspicious activity reports (SARs) last year, the DSA said.
That’s compared to 73,959 in 2020 and 14,845 in 2019. Combined, these money services businesses in San Francisco accounted for about one in 15 of the nearly 3.1 million SARS reports around the country in 2021, the DSA report found.
For all PYMNTS crypto coverage, subscribe to the daily Crypto newsletter.
New PYMNTS study: How consumers use digital banks
A PYMNTS survey of 2,124 US consumers shows that while two-thirds of consumers have used FinTechs for some aspect of banking, only 9.3% call them their primary bank.
