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India Crypto Users Now Can Avoid Banks Closing Their Accounts

By Natalie Wu | January 19, 2019
India Crypto Users Now Can Avoid Banks Closing Their Accounts
India Crypto Users Now Can Avoid Banks Closing Their Accounts

A few days ago, Morgan Creek founder and partner, Anthony Pompliano, tweeted about Indian banks’ last move to prevent bitcoin trading. Accordingly, banks threatened to close any account having signs of dealing with cryptocurrencies without any further correspondence.

A spokesperson for local cryptocurrency exchange Instashift told news.bitcoin.com that banks have been closing many accounts where cryptocurrency-related words such as “bitcoin” spotted in their transaction remarks. Referencing this news, the CEO of crypto exchange Wazirx, Nischal Shetty, shared with news.Bitcoin.com on Tuesday that: “Majority of the people understand not to enter such terms in the remarks. So simply avoiding entering anything related to crypto in the payment remarks is more than enough to avoid any problems from banks. There’s no other way for banks to know if a P2P transaction was done to transact in crypto.”

This strategy has been adopted by many other crypto-users as one advised to use P2P without writing anything related to crypto in remarks as well as avoid heavy transactions. P2P is the exchange-escrowed peer-to-peer style of trading which has been growing in popularity since the RBI (Reserve Bank of India) ban. Most crypto exchanges in India offer this type of trading.

Intashift spokesperson also explained that those having their accounts closed can just “open a fresh account in another bank” and started trading using this strategy. “It’s easy to open a new account for a person in India & banks also welcome people to open accounts.”, he noted.

Meanwhile, more and more banks in India have been closing accounts relating to bitcoin trading activities. Highlighted are two major banks in the country, Kotak Mahindra Bank and Digibank. One Indian crypto-user posted letters she received from Digibank saying: ”We have observed few transactions in your account with brokers/traders, dealing in virtual currencies. Since these types of transactions are not permitted in India, we are constrained to place a credit freeze in your account”

As explained by the banks, a credit freeze prevents customer from depositing any funds into their accounts. The bank proceeded to inform that “Hence 30 days from the date of this communication your account will be closed by the bank.”

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