What it is
FinCEN's consent order describes the business precisely: Paxful "operated as an exchanger of convertible virtual currencies, and operated both a hosted CVC wallet service and a marketplace that connected peer-to-peer buyers and sellers". Paxful, Inc. is a Delaware corporation, and during the period FinCEN examined it had an office in New York City. The same order records that the company registered as a money services business with FinCEN in 2015, which is where the founding year in this entry comes from.
The distinguishing feature was the range of things you could pay with. The order records over 400 payment methods, from prepaid access cards to bank transfers to cash by mail, and notes that iTunes and Amazon prepaid cards alone accounted for over $1.7 billion of trade volume. That is what made the site useful where cards and bank rails do not reach, and it is also what made it attractive to people moving money they should not have been moving.
FinCEN counted over 4 million users and more than 50 million completed trades in its review period, plus over 20 million external bitcoin transactions worth well over $10 billion moving to and from customer accounts. The Justice Department's own figures for 1 January 2017 to 2 September 2019 are 26.7 million trades worth nearly $3 billion, on which Paxful collected more than $29.7 million in revenue.
FinCEN records that in April 2023 "new owners and management took control of Paxful, replacing and removing the management and ownership who were in place" during the conduct described below. The platform continues to operate.
On the record
Paxful Holdings Inc. pleaded guilty in the Eastern District of California to conspiring to violate the Travel Act by promoting illegal prostitution, to conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business by knowingly transmitting funds derived from criminal offences, and to conspiring to violate the Bank Secrecy Act's anti-money-laundering programme requirement. On 10 February 2026 the court sentenced the company to a criminal penalty of $4 million. The Justice Department states that Paxful agreed the appropriate penalty was $112,500,000 and that the department set the figure at $4 million after concluding the company could not pay more.
Co-founder and former chief technology officer Artur Schaback pleaded guilty on 8 July 2024 to conspiracy to fail to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering programme, and resigned from the board. FinCEN imposed a $3.5 million civil money penalty by consent order dated 9 December 2025, half of it credited against the criminal resolution.