In its first foray into the crypto sector, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform is dialing up the pressure on federal agencies and crypto exchanges to protect Americans from fraudsters.
In a series of letters sent Tuesday morning, the committee asked four agencies, including the Department of the Treasury, the Federal Trade Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as five digital asset exchanges — Coinbase, FTX, Binance.US, Kraken, and KuCoin — for information and documents about what they are doing, if anything, to safeguard consumers against scams and combat cryptocurrency-related fraud.
More than $1 billion in crypto has been lost to fraud since the start of 2021, according to research from the FTC.
“As stories of skyrocketing prices and overnight riches have attracted both professional and amateur investors to cryptocurrencies, scammers have cashed in,” wrote Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D.-Ill., Chair of the Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy. “The lack of a central authority to flag suspicious transactions in many situations, the irreversibility of transactions, and the limited understanding many consumers and investors have of the underlying technology make cryptocurrency a preferred transaction method for scammers.”
The letters ask that the federal agencies and crypto exchanges respond by Sept. 12 with information about what they are doing to protect consumers. The committee says that…
