LocalBitcoins prohibits users from Iran from buying Bitcoins

The popular LocalBitcoins p2p platform has ceased to provide its services to Iranian users. The likely reason for such a decision could be US sanctions, although the service representatives did not state this directly, reports CoinDesk .

It is noteworthy that within a few weeks, trading volumes in Iranian rials on LocalBitcoins increased significantly, eventually reaching the figures for January 2018 (45.64 billion Iranian rials in a week).

In response to a question from a Twitter user, the site declared unacceptable work risks in the region.

Hello, our services are not available for risk-based reasons.

– LocalBitcoins.com (@LocalBitcoins) May 16, 2019

LocalBitcoins support service confirmed that they no longer provide services in Iran, but also did not give specific reasons.

Note that the platform was the best option for Iranian cryptocurrency traders, as it not only worked with local banks, but also provided liquidity and security of transactions through escrow. Iranian bitcoin exchanges can not consistently ensure the execution of orders in excess of 2 BTC.

So, Iranian users are forced to switch to decentralized exchanges like Bisq. The latter is based on the Tor network and recently added support for Farsi.

Recall LocalBitcoins is in the jurisdiction of Finland and must comply with the AML-legislation of this country. In early spring, the site made changes to the user verification process, which involves four levels of accounts that differ in the available transaction volumes from BTC.

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