Westpac to Limit How Much Customers Can Send to Crypto Exchanges, With No Exceptions

A Westpac customer who buys crypto by sending Australian dollars from the bank to an exchange will, starting Dec. 1, have a ceiling on how much of that money can go out each month. Westpac said on its website that from that date it “may limit payments we reasonably identify as being made to cryptocurrency exchanges to a $10,000 cumulative monthly limit.”

The ceiling is A$10,000 for each customer in a calendar month, added up across the customer’s relevant Westpac accounts. Westpac listed Online Banking, the Westpac App, and credit and debit cards as the channels it may apply to, and said the products covered “may vary from time to time.” Each holder of a joint account gets a separate A$10,000.

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After a customer reaches the cap, further payments to an exchange “may be rejected until the next calendar month begins,” Westpac said. The bank will not grant exemptions or raise the limit for anyone, though it also said it cannot guarantee that a payment above A$10,000 won’t get through.

The rule covers only the exchanges Westpac identifies at the moment a payment is made, and the bank has not published a list. Paying an exchange in a branch “will not be supported” from Dec. 1. Money moving the other way is untouched: Westpac said withdrawals from exchanges into its accounts “aren’t changing,” and it told customers to ask their exchange about any limits on that side.

Westpac tied the change to scams, saying criminals increasingly steer victims toward crypto because funds are hard to recover once sent. The bank pointed to the National Anti-Scam Centre‘s Targeting Scams Report 2025, published in March 2026, and said crypto figured in 46% of reported scam losses last year.

Westpac trialled blocks on some crypto payments in May 2023, pointing to investment scams. The new limit puts a fixed dollar figure on top of that approach, and because the list of covered exchanges stays private, a customer cannot know before sending whether a given transfer will count toward it. The customers most affected are those who move more than A$10,000 a month into crypto through Westpac, since the bank has ruled out exceptions.

Westpac is not the first Australian lender to put forward this number. Unchained reported in June 2023 that Commonwealth Bank of Australia planned to hold customers’ payments to crypto exchanges to A$10,000 a calendar month.

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