Anti-crypto war: this Australian bank joins the US fight

They’re blocking their customers’ money! U.S. authorities and regulators wage a merciless war on Bitcoin (BTC) and decentralized cryptocurrencies for several months. An attack that bankers anti-cryptos are happy to join. This is particularly true of National Australia Bank (NAB), a fierce critic of crypto-assets. This Australian bank even went so far as to block […]

They’re blocking their customers’ money! U.S. authorities and regulators wage a merciless war on Bitcoin (BTC) and decentralized cryptocurrencies for several months. An attack that bankers anti-cryptos are happy to join. This is particularly true of National Australia Bank (NAB), a fierce critic of crypto-assets. This Australian bank even went so far as to block transactions with certain crypto exchanges, arbitrarilyif they don’t get their heads back.

This Australian bank cries  » scam alert « against crypto

While more and more banks have finally realized the enormous potential for innovation of the Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, some backward-looking bankers are still taking anti-crypto measures as in 2017/2018.

This is unfortunately the case for National Australia Bankwhich proudly announces in a communication to have cancelled transactions from its customers to designated « scam alerts » ( » scam alert « ).

National Australia Bank cries crypto scam alert. At issue are transactions by its customers deemed dubious.
National Australian Bank on alert for crypto transactions.

While we might applaud the fight against proven scams, the devil is in the detail. Indeed, this fight against scams is a pretext used (abused?) by the NAB to justify new « blockades against certain cryptocurrency platforms ». The latter are not clearly mentioned, and are referred to by bankers as those « where scams are more numerous ».. A very vague description.

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National Australia Bank causes $270 million interruption

This Australian bank explains that it has set up a alert message at the time of payment ( » payment prompts « ), concerning transactions that it deems to be « risky.

Thus, nearly 12% of customers would be discouraged by this warning message, and finally prefer cancel their transaction. In this way 270 million dollars of payments that would have been stopped during the four months between March and July 2023.

« (…) Alert messages at payment time include a checklist based on unusual activity, designed to prompt the customer to pause and review the payment before pressing the send button. (…) Although the vast majority of customers end up making their payment after receiving this alert, we find that payments worth around $290,000 are ultimately abandoned every day. (…) We have added this extra friction to help customers detect the warning signs. [de possibles arnaques]. (…) « 

Chris Sheehan, head of investigations and fraud at NAB

History obviously doesn’t tell us what percentageof the $270 million in transfers stopped in 4 months, would really have ended up in a scam and not to a legitimate (but deemed « risky » by bankers) crypto platform. In any case, on 1 year from last year, 221 million dollars were reportedly hijacked by scams. Crypto exchanges suffer at least heavily since, for example, Binance has lost its Australian banking partners overnight at the end of June 2023.

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