India's FIU Flags 15 Offshore Crypto Platforms and Seeks Takedowns

India's Financial Intelligence Unit sent non-compliance notices to 15 offshore crypto platforms on Tuesday and asked intermediaries to pull their apps and web addresses from public view. The notices went out under Section 13 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, the clause that lets the unit warn a firm, direct it to fix its controls or fine it. Weex, Blofin, WOO X, WhiteBIT and Pionex are on the list, along with several swap services and one on-ramp. None of them is registered with the unit, which any platform serving Indian customers has had to do since March 2023, office in the country or not. Five accounts print the same 15 names.

Fifteen names, and one account that garbled them

The list runs Weex, Blofin, Rezorex, Bitunix, DigiFinex, Toobit, XT.com, Latoken, WOO X, Pionex, ChangeNow, SimpleSwap, Fixedfloat, WhiteBIT and Guardarian. CoinDesk, crypto.news, The Crypto Times, PANews and the IANS wire carry it identically. YourStory names seven of them and renders Pionex as "Pionea", which reads as a transcription slip and not a different list. The Crypto Times sorts the 15 by function, with exchanges in one group, swap services such as SimpleSwap and ChangeNow in another, and Guardarian as an on-ramp. It also itemizes the grounds cited: failure to register as a reporting entity, weak identity checks, no suspicious-transaction reports. That breakdown appears in that account alone.

How many rounds came before this one

The count of earlier sweeps does not settle. CoinDesk dates the first to December 2023, when nine exchanges including Binance, Kraken and KuCoin were served, and reads Tuesday's action as the sequel to it. The Crypto Times calls this the third wave since late 2023 and puts a middle round in October 2025 at 25 exchanges. BingX's news page carries that same 25 figure. Two waves on one telling, three on the other. They do not reconcile, and no account points to a register that would settle it.

What compliance cost the last time

Binance is the precedent everyone reaches for. Its penalty appears as 18.82 crore rupees at CoinDesk, 188.2 million rupees at crypto.news and $2.25 million in Gulf News's June 2024 account. Those are one number in three renderings and they agree. crypto.news says Binance registered afterwards and resumed serving Indian users, and that KuCoin and Bybit took the same route. Roughly 49 platforms now sit on the register, a figure carried by The Crypto Times, blockchain.news and CoinGabbar, with about 28 crore rupees collected in penalties across 2024 and 2025. CCN puts 2025 fines at $3.1 million over a different window, which is a separate measure and not a fourth version of the same one.

"Crypto products and NFTs are unregulated and can be highly risky. There may be no regulatory recourse for any loss from such transactions," the warning ran in the wording crypto.news published.

CoinDesk prints the first sentence word for word and trims the second. IANS attributes the same language to the Finance Ministry instead of the unit, and PANews renders it loosely as digital assets being unregulated and extremely high-risk. Whose statement it is depends on which account is read. The Ministry of Finance is quoted separately by YourStory on what registration obliges: customer due diligence, record-keeping, reporting of suspicious transactions.

Nothing yet from the 15

None of the named platforms has responded on the record in any account reviewed here. No compliance deadline is attached to this round and no penalty figure, and nobody has shown an app store or an internet provider acting on the takedown request. Users of those venues risk losing access to deposits while the blocking works through, on The Crypto Times's reading, which stands alone. Australia's regulator worked its own list instead, and cancelled or refused 45 crypto and remittance registrations across a year. Pakistan went the opposite way this month and opened licensing with a filing deadline. India's unit is doing both at once, registering what applies to it and asking others to block what does not.