India Flags 15 Offshore Crypto Platforms for AML Lapses Ahead of Parliament’s VDA Hearing

FIU-IND issued non-compliance notices under PMLA Section 13 to 15 offshore crypto platforms on September 9 and sought takedown of their apps and websites. The sweep covers Weex, Blofin, Bitunix, DigiFinex, Toobit, Rezorex, XT.com, Latoken, WOO X, Pionex, ChangeNow, SimpleSwap, FixedFloat, WhiteBIT and Guardarian. It lands a week before the Department of Economic Affairs testifies to Parliament’s Standing Committee on Finance, on September 16, about how India should regulate virtual digital assets. India’s Financial Intelligence Unit issued non-compliance notices to 15 offshore crypto platforms on September 9, ordering them to take their apps and websites off the market under Section 13 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. The timing lines up with Parliament’s own crypto calendar. On September 16, the Department of Economic Affairs is due to testify before the Standing Committee on Finance on virtual digital assets, a hearing that was originally set for August 27 and got postponed without explanation. That committee’s work is expected to touch on why roughly 91.5% of Indian crypto trading volume sits on offshore platforms as of last October, largely beyond FIU’s direct reach. A sweep against 15 offshore venues a week before that testimony reads as the agency putting a visible enforcement record on the table going into a hearing that will otherwise dwell on how much trading has left India altogether. The named platforms are Weex, Blofin, Bitunix, DigiFinex, Toobit, Rezorex, XT.com, Latoken, WOO X, Pionex, ChangeNow, SimpleSwap, FixedFloat, WhiteBIT and Guardarian. FIU-IND’s takedown request relies on Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act and 2025 amendments to the IT rules. One outlet’s report of the same action listed several of these under their registered legal-entity names rather than brand names, and one of those entity names did not clearly match any platform on the brand-name list; that discrepancy has not been independently resolved here. This is not FIU-IND’s first pass at offshore exchanges. In December 2023, it issued show-cause notices to nine larger platforms, including Binance, Kraken and KuCoin, under the same March 2023 rule that requires any provider serving Indian users to register with FIU-IND regardless of where it is based. Several of those platforms were blocked in India by January 2024. Binance eventually registered and paid a penalty of roughly ₹18.82 crore, about $2.25 million, before returning to the Indian market. This time the target list moves past the exchanges already brought to heel and into a second tier of smaller venues, plus several instant-swap services that do not hold customer accounts in the same way. The notices also follow reports that Indian users have been converting stablecoins like USDT into gift cards through overseas services based in Sweden, Germany and Singapore, then redeeming those cards domestically for groceries, fuel and gold.