No Way We Can Police All the Fraud, Says a CFTC Commissioner

A U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) commissioner said Tuesday it is impossible to police all the fraud because there is just a lot.

Christy Goldsmith Romero is one of the regulator's five commissioners. She said cases related to crypto make up 20% of the agency's caseload, including civil cases against the exchanges Binance and FTX.

"There's just a lot of fraud in the space," Goldsmith Romero said at a white collar crime conference at the New York City Bar Association. "There's just no way we can police all the fraud, but we've got to do something."

CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam wants greater authority from lawmakers to regulate the spot crypto markets.

Goldsmith Romero refuted the idea that the CFTC and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have a "turf war" over regulating cryptocurrencies, but acknowledged that many products in the industry are new and regulators are "still trying to figure it out."

She also said that crypto firms should not assume that the CFTC is a friendlier regulator than the deep-pocketed SEC.

In March, the CFTC sued Binance and its CEO, Changpeng Zhao, for operating a sham compliance program.

Changpeng Zhao argued that the indictment was an"incomplete recitation of facts."

In the FTX case, the CFTC accused the defunct exchange and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried of causing the loss of more than $8 billion in customer funds.

Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty to criminal charges brought by the U.S. Department of Justice.

(Source: Reuters)