According to an official announcement published on April 9, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF) has issued a stern warning to the people of France about Kuvera LLC, a local company that is reportedly offering training modules and specialized software for trading on highly speculative products, including foreign exchange markets and digital assets.
The AMF, which regulates the stock market in France, warned the public about the company, claiming that it has not gotten any authorization from the regulator to provide any trading activities within the country.
According to the stock market regulator, the company “offers the opportunity to subscribe for training courses and software solutions presented as an aid for investing in the Forex market and in crypto assets.” It also added that the company has been known to target France’s young people, particularly its high school students.
Runs in the Family, It Seems
The company, whose operations have now been outed, reportedly operates under two separate brands, Kuvera France and Kuvera LLC. Both brands are also said to be subsidiaries of Investview, a software company based in the United States.
Back in September 2018, Investview, which itself operated under the brand name Wealth Generators at the time, was fined $150,000 by the United States Commodity Futures and Trading Commission (CTFC). At the time, the securities regulator had accused the company of illegally offering binary and forex trading options to retail investors across the country.
The AMF Doesn’t Play Around
Over the past few months, the AMF has built a reputation for being particularly tough on companies and websites which were either unregistered or were deemed to be promoting “unauthorized” services and content. Via an official announcement, it blacklisted 21 investment and crypto websites in September 2018, claiming that they were “unauthorized” and dealt in offering “atypical investments.”
Also, in December 2018, the regulator published an announcement saying that it had blacklisted four websites, on the grounds that they provided crypto offerings without receiving the required permission.
Is a French Crypto Ban in the Works?
The actions of the AMF also seem to mirror the perceptions of French authorities towards the crypto industry in a way. While crypto activities are still being carried out in the country, there have been several hints pointing towards a potential ban. In March 2019, French financial expert Éric Woerth made headlines for suggesting a “ban on all anonymous cryptocurrencies.”
Woerth serves as the head of the Finance Committee of France’s National Assembly, and last month, the Committee put together a comprehensive report on blockchain technology and crypto assets. In the foreword to the report, Woerth argued that it would be “appropriate” to ban all crypto-related activities that are based on the objective of enhancing use anonymity.
His remarks read:
“We must be aware of the problems that cryptocurrencies can pose in terms of fraud, tax evasion, money laundering or fraud, or energy consumption. It would also have been appropriate to propose a ban on the dissemination and trade in cryptocurrencies built to ensure complete anonymity by preventing any identification procedure by design.” His remarks also proceeded to list some of the “privacy-focused” altcoins, including ZCash (ZEC), Monero (XMR), DeepOnion (ONION), and PIVX (PIVX), which he claimed were developed for the purpose of “bypassing any possibility of identifying the holders.”
The document didn’t specify the extent to which Woerth would like for these anonymity coins to be banned. It could be anything, from imposing severe penalties on local exchanges that list their trading options to imposing a complete ban on the use of the assets.
