Block settles with the US Justice Department and will pay $764 million. The settlement closes a case over weak anti-money-laundering controls. The agreement was reached in October and disclosed in an SEC filing on November 3.
Block is the payments company of Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter. It owns the Cash App, through which you can buy Bitcoin.
The payout is larger than the company's entire quarterly profit. Quarterly profit is $566 million. For a trader, this is a signal about the risks of a major crypto service.
What makes up the payout?
The full fine is $964 million. It was reduced to $764 million by crediting prior regulator fines. The company has already reserved the money.
In exchange, the Justice Department defers a criminal charge for three years. The claim is that Block failed to build a working anti-money-laundering system as required by the Bank Secrecy Act.
If the company meets the conditions within three years, the charge will be dropped.
Why did the investigation start?
The investigation has been ongoing since 2023 - after a report by Hindenburg Research. It asserted two theses at once.
- Inflated user numbers. Cash App allegedly counted duplicates and fake accounts.
- Weak identity verification. Because of it, criminals got onto the platform.
Block rejected these conclusions. A parallel SEC investigation was closed in March 2026 with no claims.
What came before?
There was already a precedent. In April 2025, New York's financial regulator fined Block $40 million.
- 169 thousand unverified suspicious activity alerts by 2020
- 18 thousand such alerts in 2018
- 10% - only above this share did the system automatically block Bitcoin transfers to wallets linked to terrorist financing
What about Block's crypto business?
In the same report, the company disclosed a decline in its crypto segment. Profit from it fell 50% for the quarter, to $52 million versus $104 million a year earlier. Bitcoin revenue - down 11%, to $1.8 billion.
The reason - the company itself cut fees on some Bitcoin transactions in Cash App. Overall profit still grew 22%, to $3.24 billion.
Key point: cheap crypto fees cost Block a halving of segment profit, and on top of that came the $764 million Justice Department case.
If you trade crypto on a prop account, it's worth checking platform terms in advance - for example, via matching a challenge to your market or the prop firm catalog.
Buying crypto where it's cheaper?
First comes a below-market fee, then a Justice Department case for three-quarters of a billion. And it's unclear what will happen to the service in a year. With prop firms the story is the same: their instruments, leverage and platforms differ more than the profit-share figures on the homepage. Somewhere crypto is only a couple of BTC and ETH pairs, somewhere trading is around the clock, somewhere weekends are closed. This list is worth checking before paying for an evaluation.