- Pakistan-based Bank Alfalah urged its customers to stop using cryptocurrency.
- The action came soon after the country’s central bank submitted a report to the Sindh High Court pushing for a complete ban of cryptocurrencies.
- Multiple banks have blocked customers’ credit cards suspected of using cryptocurrency.
Pakistan-based Bank Alfalah has banned using cryptocurrency transactions for their customers. The bank has been sending SMS notifications to alert customers from using cryptocurrency in its banking channels.
Various media outlets reported the bank’s SMS to customers:
Dear Customer, Virtual currencies/coins/tokens, etc. are not legal tender, issued or guaranteed by the government of Pakistan and the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has not authorized or licensed any individual or entity for the same. Kindly avoid conducting such transactions from any channel pertaining to Bank Alfalah.
Recently, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), the country’s central bank, has submitted a crypto report to the Sindh High Court (SHC), the country’s supreme judiciary. Soon after this, many reports said that Bank Alfalah has started sending SMS to their customers.
The central bank recommended that cryptocurrencies be declared banned and illegal completely. Following this, the SHC directed the law to finance ministries to review the SBP report and plan a legal structure for crypto.
Also recently, there has been a massive scam alleged to have stolen over $100 million from Pakistani investors. Consequently, the Pakistan Federal Investigation Authority (FIA) recently published a notice to crypto exchange Binance. The authority also froze 1,064 bank accounts of customers involved in crypto transactions in exchanges including Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN), Binance, and Coinmama.
Additionally, ProPakistani, an online blog, reported that due to suspected cryptocurrency transactions, several banks have blocked credit card transactions of their customers. Moreover, other banks in the country have also frozen the customers’ accounts that had been using the Binance P2P marketplace.
Bank Alfalah was incorporated in 1992, with a network consisting of more than 200 cities across the country. It is claimed as one of the largest private banks in Pakistan. The bank is owned and operated by Abu Dhabi Group and has a worldwide presence in UAE, Bahrain, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan.