Vancouver Crypto Exchange Fined a Record $177 Million

Federal officials have fined a Vancouver-based cryptocurrency exchange nearly $177 million, saying it failed to report transactions that may have involved laundered money linked to child sex abuse material, fraud and sanctions evasion.

Canada’s financial intelligence agency has ordered Cryptomus to pay the record-setting penalty after finding the exchange failed on more than 1,000 occasions in a single month to report suspicious transactions with a possible link to money laundering or terrorist financing.

The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, or Fintrac, also accused Cryptomus of defying Canadian sanctions against Iran and other “high-risk” jurisdictions. 

The penalty — which is significantly larger than any Fintrac has ever issued — comes after the IJF exclusively reported that Cryptomus traded huge sums of cryptocurrency with Garantex, a now-defunct Russian cryptocurrency exchange that was a favoured tool of cybercriminals.

The IJF also reported that Cryptomus had traded with an Iranian cryptocurrency exchange, which was also accused of helping people evade sanctions against that country. 

Fintrac director Sarah Paquet said the “unprecedented” size of the penalty spoke to the severity of Cryptomus’ violations. 

Fintrac said the company failed to report 1,068 suspicious transactions in the month of July 2024 alone. In that same month, it also failed 1,518 times to report receiving more than $10,000 worth of cryptocurrency in individual transactions, as required by law. 

“Given that numerous violations in this case were connected to trafficking in child sexual abuse material, fraud, ransomware payments and sanctions evasion, Fintrac was compelled to take this unprecedented enforcement action,” Paquet said in a statement. 

Cryptomus, incorporated in B.C. under the name Xeltox Enterprises Ltd., styled itself as a payment processor for merchants hoping to accept payment in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. 

The B.C. Securities Commission said the company operated as an unregistered exchange where users could buy and sell different cryptocurrencies. The company has previously advertised on its website that it did not take steps to validate the identities of people trading on its platform, which is required by law. 

The IJF previously interviewed three cryptocurrency analysts who used software to analyze transactions involving Cryptomus on cryptocurrency blockchains. All three said Cryptomus traded extensively with Garantex, which the U.S. government has accused of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in dirty cash. 

TRM Labs, a leading analysis company, told the IJF that Cryptomus traded about US$250 million worth of cryptocurrency with Garantex between January 2024 and March 2025. 

TRM Labs vice-president Ari Redbord said at the time that his company had also observed “direct transactional relationships” between numerous cybercriminal groups and Cryptomus, including four groups “suspected of operating from the Russian Federation.” 

The three analysts also said Cryptomus had traded extensively with Nobitex, an Iranian cryptocurrency exchange. Fintrac said Cryptomus failed to report 7,557 separate transactions with Iran between July and December 2024, violating the strict sanctions that Canada has in place against that country.

Fintrac also said Cryptomus failed to report suspicious transactions related to so-called “darknet” marketplaces hawking illegal goods and “virtual currency exchanges or services located in Russia or in another high-risk jurisdiction with weak anti-money laundering regulations.” 

The result, Fintrac said, was “the loss of critical financial information that could have been used by Fintrac to produce actionable financial intelligence for the investigation and prosecution of money laundering and terrorist financing offences.”

While Cryptomus is legally based in Vancouver, it has no apparent physical presence there.

The company’s former address is a downtown co-working space that the IJF has previously reported is used on paper by dozens of financial businesses, some of whom have connections to money laundering hotspots like Cyprus, Panama and Russia. 

The owner of that co-working space previously told the IJF many of those companies use her address fraudulently. 

Last month the company changed its listed address to a new one in Vancouver’s Olympic Village neighbourhood. That address is also used by four other registered money services businesses. Cryptomus’ only listed director is Sabina Berdieva, who has an address in Uzbekistan. The company’s former directors had addresses in Lithuania. 

The company’s founder is an Uzbekistani national named Sanjar Berdiev, according to an unnamed representative of the company who previously wrote to the IJF. Fintrac says Kakhanova Renata Andreyevna, a Kazakh patent lawyer, applied for the Canadian trademark for Cryptomus.

Andreyevna appears to have also applied to trademark Xeltox’s name in the U.K. and Australia.

Fintrac says the company has no employees in Canada and that its representatives communicated with the agency from Spain and Uzbekistan during a March 2025 investigation.

The company was still registered as a money services business with Fintrac at the time, though that registration expired earlier this year, according to that agency’s public registry.

During its correspondence with Cryptomus, Fintrac said the company admitted the phone number it had provided the agency “was not affiliated” with the company. Fintrac said Cryptomus also admitted the email addresses it had given Fintrac “were inaccessible and had not been updated.” 

Access to Cryptomus’ website was blocked in Canada earlier this year. 

The penalty Fintrac issued to Cryptomus dwarfs the previous record fine of $19.552 million given last month to a Seychelles-based money services business.