U.S. Crypto Traders Evade Offshore Exchange Bans

A report released Friday found that hundreds of Americans are trading risky crypto derivatives on offshore exchanges such as FTX and Binance.

crypto enthusiasts can easily bypass measures that seek to block them from offshore exchanges.

Crypto derivatives allow traders to place leveraged bets on whether bitcoin, dogecoin or other digital currencies will rise or fall.

Inca reached its conclusions by scouring Twitter for activity by crypto traders, including those boasting about successful trades.

Such digital fingerprints allowed Inca to link a Twitter account to a trader on one of seven offshore exchanges: Binance, Bitfinex, BitMEX, Bybit, FTX, Huobi and OKEx.

In all, Inca found more than 2,000 Twitter accounts used by crypto derivatives traders, including 372 belonging to Americans.

traders identified by Inca represent a tiny portion of the millions of users on offshore crypto exchanges.

traders active on such exchanges, though, since traders don’t necessarily broadcast their activity on Twitter.

Of the Americans identified by Inca, 240 were users of FTX, far more than on the other six exchanges.

FTX reviewed a portion of the Twitter accounts identified by Inca and took steps to remove suspected U.S.

Those users accounted for just 0.01% of the exchange’s trading volume, and some of the users identified as Americans by Inca were “mistagged,” he added.

Americans can access offshore crypto exchanges by using virtual private networks, tools that can be used to mask the country where an internet user is based?

traders can also slip past user-identity checks that aim to filter out Americans, sometimes by lying about where they are from.

regulators have stepped up their efforts to police offshore crypto exchanges.

The largest such exchanges handle tens of billions of dollars of trades daily, mostly in derivatives.