In 2018, barely a month passed without an official at a financial institution or government department calling on crypto to clean up its act. In the last quarter of the year alone, the United States Department of the Treasury, the Canadian Parliament and the Russian Federal Financial Monitoring Service all urged or announced the introduction of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws for cryptocurrencies, and all of them based their moves on the (noticeably mistaken) presumption that cryptocurrencies are a primary haven for criminals, who use them either as a medium of exchange for illicit goods or as a means of hiding (i.e., laundering) the source of dirty money.
However, when the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) dished out a $10 million fine on Dec. 26 for failures to comply with AML legislation, this penalty didn't actually go to a crypto exchange or crypto-related business. Instead, it went to Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS), the 38th-biggest bank in the world (and the sixth-biggest in the U.S.). For anyone who's ever noticed the sheer abundance of news stories about crypto's apparent problem with money laundering, this may come as a shock, yet a deeper inspection of recent history reveals that the traditional financial world, in fact, has just as serious a problem with laundering as crypto, if not a more serious problem.