Australia's financial intelligence regulator AUSTRAC said on September 7 that it canceled, suspended, or refused to renew the registrations of 45 remittance and virtual asset providers over the past year — removing those businesses from its registers and, in most cases, from the market entirely.
AUSTRAC CEO Brendan Thomas said businesses whose registrations are canceled can no longer operate.
The GetCoins Case
The regulator used the announcement to detail its earlier cancellation of GetCoins, a virtual asset service provider formally identified as BA Digital Ventures Pty Ltd. Its registration was canceled on June 4, 2026 — three months before the September announcement — following work with the National Anti-Scam Centre that began after customer complaints.
AUSTRAC said it requested information about the provider's operations to assess its ability to manage money-laundering risk, and concluded that GetCoins was allegedly exploited by organized cryptocurrency investment scams. The regulator said its actions, together with the anti-scam centre, helped disrupt that scam activity.
The framing matters: AUSTRAC described alleged exploitation of the provider by scammers, and did not establish that GetCoins itself organized them. The disclosure reports disruption — no amount recovered for customers was given, and no criminal finding against the provider was announced.
How Registration Controls Access
Under Australian law, businesses providing digital currency exchange or virtual asset services must be registered with AUSTRAC. Losing that registration removes the permission needed to operate at all. The regulator can refuse an application, suspend or cancel an existing registration, refuse renewal, or impose conditions where it identifies an unacceptable money-laundering, terrorism-financing, or other serious-crime risk.
Across the 45 annual actions, the grounds AUSTRAC cited ranged from insufficient capacity to begin or continue trading, dormant or inactive businesses, insolvency, and inadequate registration, to failures to report material changes and significant money-laundering or terrorism-financing risk. Those are reasons across the whole cohort — not findings against GetCoins specifically. The regulator gave no sector-by-sector breakdown, so the 45 cannot be read as 45 crypto firms canceled.
The Pattern
The action fits the enforcement posture Australia has settled into: choke scam infrastructure at the regulated on-ramp rather than chase every downstream actor. For providers, the message is that registration is a living obligation — customer complaints that surface alleged scam flows through a provider's rails are enough to start the process that ends the business.
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