Cryptocurrency scams have become one of the fastest-growing forms of fraud in the country, and older Americans and rural families are among the hardest hit.
By one senator’s account, crypto-related scams made up roughly half of all cybercrime losses in the United States last year. For a Kansas family that has watched a retirement account drained by a fake investment “adviser” or a crypto-ATM scheme, that statistic is not abstract. It is the phone call you dread.
For years, Washington has failed these families twice over: It never wrote clear rules for digital assets, and it never gave law enforcement the coordinated tools to chase the criminals exploiting the gap. Congress finally has a bill that takes on both problems at once, and the Senate is about to decide whether it lives or dies.
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, known as the CLARITY Act, is the most significant cryptocurrency legislation ever to move through Congress. The House passed it just over a year ago in a lopsided bipartisan vote, 294 to 134. The Senate Banking Committee advanced its own version in May, and a merged, updated text is now on the Senate floor’s doorstep.
At its core, the bill does something overdue: It decides who is in charge. For more than a decade, federal agencies policed digital assets through scattered enforcement actions rather than written law, leaving honest businesses guessing and investors exposed. CLARITY draws the lines, giving the Commodity Futures Trading Commission authority over digital commodities and leaving the Securities and Exchange Commission responsible for investment contracts.
For Kansas community banks, local entrepreneurs, and everyday savers, that is long-awaited certainty.
Here is where Kansas has a direct stake. Late last year, Sen. Jerry Moran teamed with Michigan Democrat Elissa Slotkin on the SAFE Crypto Act, legislation to stand up a public-private task force, chaired by the Treasury and drawing in the Justice Department, financial-crimes investigators, the Secret Service, state regulators, and industry experts — to track, disrupt and prosecute digital-asset fraud.
The updated CLARITY Act now moving through the Senate contains exactly that kind of muscle. It forms a public-private task force on fraud, raises funding for state and local crypto investigations, sets up training for police and prosecutors, and adds targeted measures aimed at elder fraud and crypto-ATM scams. These are precisely the protections Moran has championed, the guarantee that market growth will not come at the expense of the people most likely to be victimized by it.
Clear rules are not only good for consumers; they keep innovation and the jobs that come with it on American soil. When the United States refuses to write the rules, other countries write them instead, and the next generation of financial technology gets built somewhere else. A patchwork of conflicting state rules and offshore standards serves no one in Kansas.
There is also a durability argument that too few people make. The clearest federal guidance on crypto today rests on decisions agencies can reverse. A rule written by regulators can be unwritten by the next set of regulators with the stroke of a pen. A law passed by Congress cannot. That is the difference between protection that lasts and protection that evaporates after the next election.
The catch is the calendar. The Senate has only days before it leaves Washington for its August recess, and if the bill does not clear the floor before the break, its momentum likely stalls into next year, when a midterm election makes every complicated bill harder to pass. A framework this consequential should not be left to expire on a scheduling technicality.
Sen. Moran should press to get this across the finish line, and Sen. Roger Marshall should join him. Because the bill needs 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, every senator’s position matters, and Kansans who are tired of watching neighbors lose their savings, and businesses tired of operating without a rulebook, should let both of our senators hear it.
Kansas has always believed in clear rules and fair play. The Senate has a narrow window to put that belief into law.
Talha Siddiqi is president of the Kansas chapter of the Stand With Crypto Alliance. He is based in Wichita.
This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Congress has a chance to stop rising crypto scams | Opinion
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