According to an announcement made by the Korean Financial Services Commission (FSC) on November 3, the providers of virtual assets in this country will no longer be able to handle any digital assets that involve a high risk of money laundering. These updates have been made within the framework of the guidelines contained in the Special Payments Act - a regulation that specifically covers the legality of crypto currencies in South Korea. The Financial Intelligence Unit has paid special attention to "dark coins", which are crypto privacy-oriented currencies, due to records of transactions that are reportedly difficult for the group to detect. This could potentially affect the use of privacy-oriented coins such as Zcash (ZEC), Monero (XMR) and Dash (DASH).
The amendments to the Special Payments Act are expected to come into effect from March 2021. The crypto account requires that existing exchanges apply an appropriate "KYC" policy and anti-money laundering or anti-money laundering policy. The exchanges must also report their actions within six months of the implementation of the Act. In addition to not handling privacy related coins, virtual asset service providers are required to confirm the real names of their clients by verifying them with personal information such as national identification numbers.
Due to existing international regulations, many crypto exchange operations in this country no longer exchange privacy-related coins. In September 2019, the South Korean crypto exchange arm OKEx removed ZEC, XMR, DASH, Horizen (ZEN) and Super Bitcoin (SBTC), citing the guidelines set out by the Task Force on Privacy and Privacy. The crypto Upbit Local Exchange announced that it will stop handling three crypto currencies focused on privacy in the same month.
