It looks like online payment service provider, PayPal, has decided to fork out a whopping $7.7m to the US government as a fine, after there were claims made that PayPal enabled payments to go through, and some of these payments happened to have violated sanctions against Iran, Cuba and Sudan. According to the US Treasury Department, the payment firm did not manage to provide adequate screening of such transactions, and along the way, failed to prevent those.
In one of the transactions, it amounted to $7,000 from someone who has already been listed by the US government to be part of the team that deals with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. PayPal has since mentioned that it had beefed up their efforts when it boils down to real-time scanning of payments.
PayPal’s statement did say that it had “voluntarily” reported to the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (Ofac) certain payments which it processed between the time window period of 2009 and 2013. A PayPal representative also shared, “Since then, we’ve taken additional steps to support compliance with Ofac regulations with the introduction of real-time scanning of payments and improved processes.” Well, this fine will not burn too large of a hole in PayPal’s pockets, but it is a wake-up call for sure.