India put nine offshore crypto exchanges on notice and sought URL blocks

India’s Financial Intelligence Unit issued compliance show-cause notices on December 28, 2023 to nine offshore virtual-digital-asset service providers and asked the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to block their URLs. The named platforms were Binance, KuCoin, Huobi, Kraken, Gate.io, Bittrex, Bitstamp, MEXC Global and Bitfinex.

The action mattered because it applied India’s anti-money-laundering framework to services based outside the country but serving Indian customers. FIU-IND’s position was that the obligation followed the activity, not a company’s physical presence. That turned registration and transaction-reporting rules into a market-access issue for some of the largest international crypto trading venues available to Indian users.

What the December 28 action established

The Ministry of Finance announcement said the notices were issued under Section 13 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002. It also said FIU-IND’s director had written to the electronics and information-technology ministry seeking URL blocks for the nine entities, which the government described as operating illegally without complying with the act.

A show-cause notice was a compliance proceeding, not a published final adjudication. Section 13 authorized the FIU director to inquire into a reporting entity’s obligations and, after finding a failure, issue a written warning, direct compliance or periodic reporting, or impose a monetary penalty. The December 28 release did not publish the individual notices, responses or final findings. It therefore supports saying enforcement began and blocking was requested—not that every website had already become inaccessible across India.

Why offshore exchanges fell within scope

India had brought specified virtual-digital-asset services into its AML and counter-financing-of-terrorism framework in March 2023. FIU-IND’s July 4 registration circular identified five covered categories: exchange between virtual assets and fiat currency; exchange between forms of virtual assets; transfers; safekeeping or administration; and financial services connected to an issuer’s offer and sale of a virtual asset.

The December 28 announcement said covered providers operating in India, whether offshore or onshore, had to register with FIU-IND as reporting entities. It also identified reporting and record-keeping among their obligations. FIU-IND said 31 virtual-digital-asset service providers had registered by the announcement date, while several offshore providers serving what it called a substantial share of Indian users had remained outside the framework. The government did not quantify that user share.

A compliance perimeter, not a crypto prohibition

The immediate institutional significance was the attempted extension of India’s compliance perimeter across borders. Registration gave FIU-IND a route to require customer due diligence, retention of transaction and identity records, internal AML controls and reporting of specified or suspicious activity. Seeking URL blocks added a separate access-control lever when an offshore company had no local office on which ordinary supervision could easily operate.

The action was not described as a blanket prohibition on owning or transferring virtual digital assets. It targeted nine named service providers over alleged noncompliance with reporting-entity obligations. Nor did the announcement say customer assets had been frozen, trading accounts closed or tokens delisted. Those distinctions were important for users trying to understand the event-day scope.

What remained uncertain on December 28

The government release did not identify the exact URLs sent for blocking, state when the request would be implemented, give response deadlines, quantify Indian accounts or balances on the platforms, or disclose whether any provider had sought registration. Contemporaneous reporting corroborated the notice list and blocking request, but did not fill those gaps.

The defensible December 28 conclusion was consequently narrow: India formally put nine offshore crypto platforms into a PMLA compliance process and sought to restrict access to their websites. Whether each notice would produce registration, a penalty, a completed block or some other outcome remained unresolved in the event-day record.