Ripple consented to pay a fine and restructure their operation, to settle civil charges related to Ripple's failure file a SAR on the aborted purchase of xrp by

Ripple consented to pay a fine and restructure their operation, to settle civil charges related to Ripple's failure file a SAR on the aborted purchase of xrp by Roger Ver (who by the way was a Ripple investor). The underlying behavior that drew the attention of regulators was that their compliance program was basically a sham during the period in question. The transaction was not "suspicious" in any conventional sense of the word -- Ver was a Ripple investor and well known to the company; his prior criminal history relates to selling fireworks by mail or something, when he was 18 or so. But technically, yes, this is a transaction that Ripple should have reported. People make a big deal of this, but keep in mind that BSA compliance, FinCEN registration, and filing SARs is the EASY part of compliance. Just file SARs on every transaction that meets the definition, that's easy. If that were the only requirement, the US would be a bastion for fintech startups. The hard part is complying with 50 state laws, many of which are non-standard and contradict each other. It is a joke that we don't have a preemptive federal regime to set a consistent rule for compliance. At the same time, on a real level, any payment provider has to be aware that a convenient and privacy-promoting platform inevitably becomes a sort of honeypot for people who are shut out of the conventional system. This is true of any data hosting company, whether financial or otherwise. We would like to think that there's no responsibility on the part of the platform provider to police content, b/c that seems a violation of freedom. On the other hand, if you look into the activity on your platform, and realize that a significant portion of it, in terms of usage, or money, relates to illegal and immoral activities that hurt other people...well, it's a hard question to balance that with notions of freedom and innovation. Unfortunately I don't think the answer is as easy as just letting providers self-police, or following a European model where banks have historically turned a blind eye toward (or even actively courted) criminal clientele.