Binance Australia is making the onboarding process difficult for new users to protect users who are most vulnerable to cryptocurrency.
Lu outlined that the general type of people Binance has flagged as vulnerable users are the elderly, people that live in remote areas, or those with disabilities. Such conclusions were the result of working with various government and research agencies focused on financial crime, he added.
The new measures are detailed in Binance Australia’s June quarterly Economic, Social and Governance (ESG) report. On August 29, the exchange said it was working on a “stringent and user-focused onboarding experience” aimed at groups with a higher occurrence of financial crime.
Speaking with Cointelegraph, Binance Aus CEO Leigh Travers and Zachary Lu from the exchange’s Financial Crime, Risk and Compliance department, noted the company has been actively working on ways to protect “vulnerable users” — which starts from the onboarding process.
“From the whole financial management perspective, we are really looking at it from end to end and also from a whole life circle’s perspective,” said Lu.
Both emphasized that the agency is paying particular attention to investment fraud, where criminals trick people into sending money by promising high returns on investments.
This type of fraud has cost Australians millions of dollars in cryptocurrency, with a recent Scamwatch report estimating that $25 million was lost to fraudulent investment schemes in the first half of 2021.
“There are 500 different scams, but investment scams are always on the top of it. So this is not exclusive to crypto scams to be honest, but investment scams overall ranked number one for a long, long time,” Lu noted.
To assess the cryptographic knowledge of new users and see if they have been tricked into signing up by an attacker under false pretenses, the company recently released a Know Your Customer (KYC)-based test that helps flag them. Suspicious activity.
Travers went on to say that a large number of “vulnerable” users fall prey to scammers, usually within the “first seven days” of boarding a plane.
September 1, Binance Aus will consider stricter identification requirements as part of the user login process. The company requires new users to provide a photo of their driver’s license and license number during registration, which allows them to submit them later.
Finance was introduced as part of the registration process to instantly verify the legitimacy of credentials, identify a vulnerable user and flag if someone is signing under a stolen ID.
Leave a Reply