Westpac may cap payments to crypto exchanges at A$10,000 a month from 1 December, with no exemptions

Westpac, one of Australia’s four largest banks, says it may cap payments to cryptocurrency exchanges at A$10,000 per calendar month for each account holder from 1 December 2026. The limit is set out on a Westpac security page that started circulating in crypto media on Thursday 29 October. It adds up every eligible payment a customer sends to exchanges the bank has identified, across their Westpac accounts and payment methods. There are no exemptions and no way to ask for a higher limit.

The bank gives one reason: scams. Money pushed into crypto is hard to get back once it has left, and Westpac says scammers push their victims to pay that way. Withdrawals from an exchange back into a Westpac account are not affected.

Westpac’s crypto payment limit: A$10,000 a month, from 1 December 2026

The wording matters. Westpac writes that it “may” limit the payments it reasonably identifies as going to crypto exchanges. That is a discretionary power, not a promise to stop every transfer above the threshold. Once a customer reaches A$10,000 within a calendar month, further eligible payments to identified exchanges may be rejected until the next month begins.

The count is cumulative. A customer who sends A$6,000 through Online Banking and A$4,000 by debit card to identified exchanges in the same month has used the whole allowance. The page lists four channels: Online Banking, the Westpac App, credit cards and debit cards. Westpac says that list may change over time.

What the cap covers and what it does not

The cap applies only to exchanges Westpac has identified at the time of the payment. The bank does not publish that list. It also warns that not every exchange, and not every set of payment details an exchange accepts, may be covered. A customer cannot check in advance which platform falls under the rule.

Branches get a stricter rule. From 1 December 2026, in-branch payments that Westpac identifies as going to crypto exchanges will not be supported at all. A customer cannot walk into a branch to send money to one of those exchanges, whatever the amount.

Joint accounts and withdrawals

Joint accounts do not share a single allowance. Westpac’s page states that each account holder has their own A$10,000 cumulative monthly limit.

Money coming the other way is untouched. Withdrawals from an exchange into a Westpac account carry on as before, although Westpac tells customers to check the exchange for any limits of its own.

No exemptions, and no promise the cap catches everything

Two lines in the notice point in opposite directions. Westpac offers no exemptions and no limit increases, so a customer with a long record of legitimate trading gets the same ceiling as everyone else. At the same time, the bank says it “does not guarantee” that payments above A$10,000 cannot happen.

The second line follows from how the cap works. It only counts payments to exchanges Westpac has identified, with payment details it recognises, and the bank says it may apply the limit at its discretion. A payment to a platform outside that list is not counted against the A$10,000.

Westpac points to scam losses, with a 46% figure

Westpac justifies the cap with a figure from the National Anti-Scam Centre’s Targeting Scams Report 2025, published in March 2026. According to Westpac, “almost half (46%)” of reported scam losses last year involved cryptocurrency. Coindaro could not open the report’s PDF to see which cut of the data that number comes from, so it is given here as Westpac’s reading of the report.

The report’s headline numbers are public. According to the report of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), as reported by Cyber Daily on 30 March 2026, Australians lost about A$2.18 billion to scams in 2025, up 7.8% on 2024, across 274,577 reports that involved a loss. The total is still below the 2022 peak of A$3.1 billion. The ACCC also set out the figures in a media release, which Coindaro could not open.

The combined figures blockchain that runs exactly as written when it is called, holding and moving funds according to its code, without an intermediary able to change the outcome.">smart contract holding reserves of two or more tokens, supplied by users, that a decentralized exchange uses to execute trades automatically at a price set by a formula.">pool reports made to Scamwatch, ReportCyber, the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange, IDCARE and ASIC. The 46% does not appear in the coverage of the report’s release that Coindaro read, which lists losses by type of scam rather than by payment method. Investment scams are by far the largest category, at A$837.7 million; our explainer on pig butchering scams shows how one common form of them works.

The same A$10,000 figure CBA chose in 2023

Westpac has been here before. On 18 May 2023, Cointelegraph reported that the bank was starting a phased trial of payment protection blocks on crypto payments, from late May that year. Westpac said then that investment scams made up about half of scam-linked customer losses, and that about a third of scams involved direct transfers to crypto exchanges.

Commonwealth Bank followed on 8 June 2023. It started holding certain payments to crypto exchanges for 24 hours or declining them, and said a A$10,000 monthly limit would come “in the coming months”, according to CryptoSlate. That is the same number Westpac now uses. Coindaro has not verified whether CBA’s limit is still in force in 2026.

National Australia Bank said on 17 July 2023 that it was blocking some payments to cryptocurrency exchanges it described as high-risk, without naming them, The Block reported. NAB put the losses of Australians to crypto-related scams over the previous year at A$221 million. ANZ is reported to have taken comparable steps, but no details could be confirmed.

What is new in 2026 is a published number. The 2023 trial blocked some payments; the new rule adds a monthly ceiling that no customer can be exempted from.

What it changes for crypto buyers

The ceiling is a monthly total, so its effect depends on the amounts. A customer who sends a few hundred dollars a month to an identified exchange stays well under it. In plain arithmetic, A$50,000 of payments to identified exchanges would take five calendar months to fit under a A$10,000 monthly cap.

For readers in Europe and the United States, this is an Australian bank decision and binds no one else. In the EU, exchanges are now licensed under MiCA, and euro deposits usually travel by SEPA transfer; our guide to the MiCA regulation explains what a licence covers. Coindaro found no French or Italian bank publishing a hard monthly cap like Westpac’s. What Coindaro found instead were anti-money-laundering checks applied case by case, with no published list of exchanges.

The scam pattern behind the cap is not Australian, though. The White House has also moved against crypto fraud, as we reported in our story on the White House crypto scam crackdown. The usual warning signs, from a stranger pushing an investment to pressure to pay fast, are listed in our guide to avoiding crypto scams.

What is still unknown before 1 December

Several points are open. The Westpac page carries no publication date, so it is not clear when the notice first went up; media coverage dates from 29 October 2026. Westpac’s page does not say which exchanges the bank has identified, how many customers or payments it expects the cap to affect, or how the new rule sits alongside the blocks it began testing in 2023.

The next date is fixed. From 1 December 2026, payments over the monthly allowance to identified exchanges may be rejected, and branch payments to those exchanges stop.