Christy Goldsmith Romero, one of the five Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) commissioners, said on Tuesday that due to the extreme amount of cryptocurrency fraud, it is impossible to police it all. However, the agency is currently working on several major cases, which comprise of around 20% of its portfolio. These include civil cases against the Binance and FTX exchanges.
Goldsmith Romero commented at a white collar crime conference at the New York City Bar Association that “there’s just a lot of fraud in the space. There’s just no way we can police all the fraud, but we’ve got to do something.” CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam has requested more authority from lawmakers to supervise spot crypto markets.
The commissioner rejected the idea that there was a dispute between the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission over the regulation of crypto. Still, she accepted that many of the industry’s products are new and the agencies were “still trying to figure it out.” She also warned crypto companies not to consider the CFTC as a more lenient regulator than the wealthy SEC.
In March, the CFTC charged Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao for allegedly having a fake compliance program. Zhao has claimed that the complaint was an “incomplete recitation of facts.” Furthermore, the CFTC case against now-bankrupt FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried blames them for leading to the loss of more than $8 billion in customer deposits. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to related criminal charges from the U.S. Department of Justice.
