AUSTRAC Removes 45 Crypto and Remittance Firms From Its Registers

Australia's anti-money-laundering regulator has taken 45 crypto and money-transfer businesses off its registers over the past twelve months. AUSTRAC said the registrations were cancelled, suspended or refused renewal, and set out the grounds: dormant or insolvent companies, firms with no capacity to operate, registrations left out of date, and businesses judged to carry significant money laundering or terrorism financing risk. Two named cases sit inside that total. One of them idled 96 crypto ATMs in August.

Administrative, not criminal

Registration with AUSTRAC is a precondition for operating as a remitter or a virtual asset service provider in Australia, and losing it is an administrative act. crypto.news makes the distinction explicitly: none of the 45 removals is a finding of criminal wrongdoing. Several were businesses that had stopped trading or never started one. What deregistration does do is immediate. Crypto Briefing reports that firms taken off the register lose the legal right to operate at once, with possible personal consequences for individuals attached to them, though only that account puts it in those terms.

GetCoins and Cryptolink

BA Digital Ventures, trading as GetCoins, had its registration cancelled on 4 June after customer complaints, in work AUSTRAC did with the National Anti-Scam Centre. The regulator's wording is careful. It said the provider "was allegedly exploited by organized cryptocurrency investment scams," which casts the company as a route the scams used and not as their author. Crypto Briefing calls the cancellation a disruption measure. Cryptolink was suspended for three months from 9 August, and that suspension took 96 crypto ATMs out of service nationwide. Only crypto.news gives the reasons, as failures in threshold transaction reporting and an inadequate risk assessment.

"The rapid movement of money across borders can create some of the highest ML/TF risks," said AUSTRAC chief executive Brendan Thomas, using the standard shorthand for money laundering and terrorism financing.

A second deadline, a different regulator

At the end of this month a separate Australian rule bites, and the two are easy to confuse. ASIC, the corporate and financial services regulator, ends its no-action position for digital asset businesses on 30 September. Firms that need a licence and have not applied risk breaching financial services law from 1 October, with civil and criminal penalties reaching 10% of annual turnover. ASIC said on 2 September that it had received more than 45 licence applications since October 2025. That coincidence of numbers is only a coincidence. The 45 AUSTRAC removals and the 45-plus ASIC applications are unrelated counts on different registers, and crypto.news was the only outlet in this sweep to mention both.

What the register does not show

No list of the 45 businesses was published, and no account carries one. The split between crypto firms and money-transfer firms is unstated, as is how many registrations remain on either register. AUSTRAC's own news page did not carry the statement when we checked, which leaves the count resting on the outlets that received it. Two accounts also mention an open investigation into Western Union, with no findings attached. Europe went through a comparable clear-out when ESMA set a July 1 stop for providers without MiCA approval, and Manila is weighing a year-long freeze on new payment licences. Australia's next number arrives on 1 October, and it will count who applied instead of who was struck off.