India's Financial Intelligence Unit issued non-compliance notices on Wednesday to 15 crypto platforms under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. The list includes Weex, Blofin, Bitunix, DigiFinex, Toobit, Rezorex, XT.com, Latoken, WOO X, Pionex, ChangeNow, SimpleSwap, FixedFloat, WhiteBIT, and Guardarian.

The agency's takedown notices, published through India's Press Information Bureau, seek removal of the platforms' applications and URLs from public access and state that the entities were operating illegally in India without complying with relevant provisions of the Act. That is the operative legal claim behind the action: not merely a compliance gap, but a finding that the platforms lacked lawful authorization to operate in the Indian market at all.

The legal basis for reaching offshore platforms in the first place traces back to March 2023, when India expanded its anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism framework to bring virtual digital asset service providers within the scope of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. That expansion required VDA service providers operating in India, whether based onshore or offshore, to register with the Financial Intelligence Unit and to meet the Act's reporting and record-keeping obligations. According to the Finance Ministry, those obligations attach regardless of whether the entity has a physical presence in India, which is the hook that allows the agency to reach platforms with no local office or incorporation.

This is not the first time the registration requirement has shaped how offshore exchanges operate in India. Bybit temporarily restricted its services in the country on January 12, 2025, while completing its Financial Intelligence Unit registration, and later restored full access to its app, as The Block reported at the time. Coinbase followed a similar path, resuming onboarding of Indian users only after it had registered with the agency. Binance's return to the Indian market took a different route: it came back in 2024 after paying a penalty of $2.25 million. Taken together, these episodes suggest that registration, and in Binance's case a monetary penalty, has functioned as the practical route back to the Indian market for platforms that fall foul of the FIU registration regime.

Separately from the enforcement notices, the Financial Intelligence Unit said crypto products and NFTs remain unregulated in India, and it warned that transactions in these products may carry no regulatory recourse if users suffer losses. That statement sits alongside, rather than as part of, the compliance action against the 15 platforms, and underscores that registration under the anti-money laundering framework is not the same thing as product regulation or investor protection.

For the 15 platforms named, the practical question now is which of the two demonstrated paths back they choose: register with the Financial Intelligence Unit and wait out a restriction, as Bybit and Coinbase did, or negotiate a penalty, as Binance did. Until one of those happens, the takedown notices stand as India's clearest signal yet that PMLA registration is not optional for any exchange with Indian users, wherever it is incorporated.