UK crime agency: Criminals use crypto to launder at scale

Britain’s National Economic Crime Centre (NECC) has warned that criminals are making “innovative use of crypto asset products to evade detection and move illicit value at scale,” according to its annual report published this week. The threat assessment describes laundering networks spreading across borders and combining novel and traditional methods.

Many organized crime groups now outsource money laundering to dedicated networks for a fee. Cryptoassets rank third among nine economic crime priorities the NECC agreed with the Financial Conduct Authority, the Home Office, and the Treasury.

The agency is developing a more proactive and intelligence-led crypto capability. Operation Atlantic, a joint effort with the U.S. Secret Service, Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and Tether, identified 20,000 approval-phishing victims and froze $12 million in March.

Operation Destabilise, targeting Russian-speaking networks converting cash into crypto, has reached 129 arrests and more than $31.7 million seized in the UK. The agency plans to expand this approach to other high-harm money laundering networks.

A Royal United Services Institute paper from an NECC-hosted roundtable argued against banning crypto privacy tools. Participants said prohibition would push illicit actors onto unregulated services and leave investigators with fewer firms to request information from.

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