South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service and financial intelligence unit have begun to inspect Hana Bank, Kookmin Bank and Nonghyup Bank to see whether they are applying anti-money-laundering controls to their crypto-currency accounts.

It was in January that the regulator began to insist that all of South Korea's banks should only handle cryptocurrency accounts for customers in their real names after performing know-your-customer or KYC checks on them. The idea was to prevent capital flight and money laundering. Since then, NongHyup Bank has begun verifying the identities of customers automaticallyat Bithumb and Coinone, two prominent cryptocurrency exchanges in the country. A smaller Bitcoin/Litecoin exchange called Coinpia was not able to rely on banks for this process and was forced to halt trading and deposits, thereby inconveniencing many of its users.