Pakistan moves to bring crypto currency boom out of the dark

ISLAMABAD, July 16 (Reuters) - Once a week Ghulam Ahmed, 38, takes time out from his crypto currency consulting business to log into a WhatsApp group with hundreds of members eager to learn how to mine and trade crypto currency in Pakistan.

From housewives looking to earn a side income to wealthy investors wanting to buy crypto mining hardware, many barely understand traditional stock markets but all are eager to cash in.

"When I open the session for questions, there's a flood of messages, and I spend hours answering them, teaching them basic things about crypto currency," said Ahmed, 38, who quit his job in 2014, believing it was more profitable to mine Bit coin.

Pakistan has seen a boom in trading and mining crypto currency, with interest proliferating in thousands of views of related videos on social media and transactions on online exchanges.

While crypto currency is not illegal in Pakistan, the global money laundering watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), has called on the government to better regulate the industry. Pakistan is on the FATF's grey list of countries it monitors for failing to check terror financing and money laundering.

In response, the federal government has set up a committee to study crypto currency regulation, which includes observers from the FATF, federal ministers, and heads of the country's intelligence agencies.

"Half the members had no clue what it was and didn't even want to understand it," said committee member Ali Fareed Khawaja, a partner at Oxford Frontier Capital and chairman of KASB Securities, a stock brokerage in Karachi.

"But the good thing is someone set up this committee. The relevant bodies in the government who need to get things done are supporting it, and the promising thing is nobody wants to stand in the way of technical innovation."

And the head of the country's central bank, Raza Bakir, said in April the authority was looking into another digital asset, a central bank digital currency, and its potential for bringing transactions happening off the books into a regulatory framework.

"We hope to be able to make some announcement on that in the coming months," he told CNN. Bakir declined to comment to Reuters on the topic