Anti Money Laundering (AML) Policy

HandleKrypto is owned and operated by Bitgate Services AS with organization number 922 385 734 and developed by BitGate AS with organization number 918 574 433. Bitgate Services AS will be referred to as “HandleKrypto”, “us”, or “we” in this policy.

The Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway published an article about how The Money Laundering Act applies to virtual currency including cryptocurrency on October 4th, 2018. You can read that article here (only available in Norwegian): https://www.finanstilsynet.no/tema/hvitvasking-og-terrorfinansiering/hvitvaskingslovens-anvendelse-for-virtuell-valuta/

The new money laundering regulation changes came into effect as of October 15th, 2018. The change includes platforms and services that allow customers to trade or exchange a type of virtual currency for an official currency (such as Norwegian kroner).

We are working on making our own service for converting of cryptocurrency and norwegian kroner. Such a service requires us to abide to the anti money laundering law and actively prevent white washing, terror financing and other criminal acts. We are registered with The Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway as you can see here: https://www.finanstilsynet.no/en/finanstilsynets-registry/detail/?id=206318

The Anti-Money Laundering Act

We must comply with a number of different requirements for the detection and prevention of money laundering, potential criminal offenses and terrorist financing.

HandleKrypto must comply with the Money Laundering Act, including it’s customer requirements. Consequently, customers must expect to identify and receive questions such as the purpose of a transaction or where said funds originated from, etc. If the customer does not wish to provide the necessary information, then we must reject their order. We are obliged to send “Økokrim” message in case of any suspicious transactions.

Know Your Customer (KYC)

The Money Laundering Act requires us to know our customers, so that we can assess the risk of money laundering or terror financing. This includes the identification of yourself, your purpose for using our services, source of funds, transactions (orders) and other behavior.

Identification

To make an assessment of the risk of criminal activities, we are required to securely and safely identify you before you can use our services.

We use the Norwegian bank ID as a method to identify you digitally. This is the most trusted and commonly used identification method, even safer than a picture of your passport. It is used by banks, merchants, tax entity and other government services.

The Money Laundering Act requires us to store proof of your identity in the form of your social security number, full name and address. We also store your bank ID identification number, so that we can easily request information about you.

We must also know if the customer is a politically exponated person. That means if the customer have a political position (PEP). They have to verify their intention with using the conversion service. Therefor the customer must answer if he is a PEP or not.

Know Your Customer Form

In larger amounts we also must know the purpose of our business relationship, the customer transactions (orders), source of funds. For this we use a form during registration where we will ask you questions in regards to this which will allow us to verify your relationship with our services.

Extra verification measures

Non standard or otherwise suspicious information from bank id AML or given in the “know your customer form” requires us to perform a manual verification to disprove any suspicion.

For politically exposed persons or relatives of such, we must know if the customer has a prominent political position or otherwise important status. We must verify what that customer’s intention with using the platform is.

Continuous monitoring

Furthermore, we are required to keep all information in regards to the customer relationship updated. We continuously monitor transactions (orders) and customer behavior. As well as regularly doing our AML check to check for hits in sanction lists or politically exposed person lists (PEP).

If anything abnormal in regards to information about the customer or other suspicious activity, we will have to ask for the questions provided in our “know your customer form” to be updated or ask additional questions through the form. We may require additional information through which could be requested via email, a phone call or digital meeting with video.

Confidentiality

Customer data we receive from external services like Norwegian bank ID and other information you provide us, is treated confidentiality in accordance with the law. You can read more about this in our privacy policy.