by Rushali 
BitPay has come under the scanner of the US regulators for violating their norms. Now, the company had to pay around half a million dollars to the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control for crypto services to be sanctioned.
On Feb 18, the regulators have said that the company has done around $129000 million worth of digital currency-related transactions with BitPay’s merchant customers” by users from Crimea, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Sudan, and Syria.
This punishment will establish the fact that the rules are the same for everyone is it companies dealing with cryptocurrencies.
The transactions happened between 2013 and 2018, and at that time BitPay only screened merchants. Despite adding IP address info about customers in 2017, OFAC says that BitPay did not analyze that information to identify users in sanctioned locations until much later.
A similar case happened with BitGo at the end of last year. These kinds of cases are clearing the message to the crypto world.
