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Crypto Exchange Kraken Settles Case With US Treasury Over Serving Customers in Iran

Kraken has agreed to pay $362,159 to settle its potential liability for violating U.S. sanctions.

Updated Nov 29, 2022, 2:27 p.m. Published Nov 28, 2022, 6:59 p.m.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has reached a settlement with crypto exchange Kraken over serving customers in Iran, OFAC said in a statement Monday.

Kraken agreed to pay $362,159 to settle its potential civil liability for apparent violations of sanctions against Iran. Kraken also agreed to invest $100,000 in implementing additional sanctions compliance controls.

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According to OFAC, Kraken failed to implement appropriate geolocation tools, including an automated internet protocol (IP) address blocking system, allowing customers in Iran to perform transaction on Kraken’s platform.

Marco Santori, chief legal officer at Kraken, told CoinDesk via email that “Kraken is pleased to have resolved this matter, which we discovered, voluntarily self-reported and swiftly corrected."

Santori added that “even before entering into this resolution, Kraken had taken a series of steps to bolster our compliance measures. This includes further strengthening control systems, expanding our compliance team and enhancing training and accountability.”

UPDATE (Nov. 28: 19:20 UTC): Added comment from Kraken.

OFAC Treasury Department Kraken Sanctions Iran

Nelson Wang

Nelson edits features and opinion stories and was previously CoinDesk’s U.S. News Editor for the East Coast. He has also been an editor at Unchained and DL News, and prior to working at CoinDesk, he was the technology stocks editor and consumer stocks editor at TheStreet. He has also held editing positions at Yahoo.com and Condé Nast Portfolio’s website, and was the content director for aMedia, an Asian American media company. Nelson grew up on Long Island, New York and went to Harvard College, earning a degree in Social Studies. He holds BTC, ETH and SOL above CoinDesk’s disclosure threshold of $1,000.