The Financial Conduct Authority, working with HMRC and the Metropolitan Police Service, targeted three London premises suspected of running illegal peer-to-peer crypto trading businesses, issuing cease and desist letters at all three sites on September 10.
It matters because peer-to-peer crypto trading sits in a genuine regulatory gap: anyone doing it as a business in the UK needs FCA registration, and the FCA confirms that zero firms currently hold one. That is not a paperwork failure, it means every peer-to-peer crypto operation running in the UK today is operating illegally by definition, which is why enforcement here targets premises and cease-and-desist orders rather than fines against registered firms. The action follows an earlier crackdown in April, and the FCA says evidence gathered is now feeding active criminal investigations, continuing a pattern also visible in Banks’ AML Systems Were Never Built for Stablecoins.
“Working with partners, we continue to track and disrupt illegal crypto activity,” said Steve Smart, the FCA’s executive director of enforcement and market oversight. Detective Sergeant Sathish Alalasundaram of the Metropolitan Police Service added that “law enforcement and partner agencies are working significantly hard to tackle criminal activity involving digital assets.”
The original insight: this crackdown lands in the same week Congress failed to pass the CLARITY Act and the CFTC moved to write crypto market rules on its own, detailed in The CLARITY Act Isn’t Stalled. It’s Dead for This Congress. The UK and US are converging on the same conclusion from opposite directions: without a registration regime that legitimate peer-to-peer operators can actually use, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are left enforcing against an entire market segment rather than supervising it.
Source: Financial Conduct Authority
