TL;DR
- The UK’s National Economic Crime Centre warned about the innovative use of crypto assets for large-scale illicit funds laundering.
- Crypto assets rank third among nine economic crime priorities agreed with the FCA, the Home Office and the Treasury in July 2025.
- A report by think tank RUSI, commissioned by the agency itself, advises against banning crypto privacy tools, considering them counterproductive.
The UK’s National Economic Crime Centre (NECC), a unit of the National Crime Agency (NCA), warned that criminals are making innovative use of crypto products to evade detection and move illicit value at scale, according to its annual report published this week.
Money laundering appears there as an expanding threat, driven by networks that combine traditional and novel methods to move funds through legal and illegal systems simultaneously.
The document notes that many organised crime groups no longer launder their own funds, but instead outsource that function to specialised networks in exchange for fees. In the same section, the agency mentions artificial intelligence as another risk vector, citing the use of synthetic identities and process automation to exploit the banking system.
New Methodologies for Laundering Crypto Assets
Crypto assets rank third on the list of nine economic crime priorities that the NECC agreed with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Home Office and the Treasury, published in July 2025. That classification places them above criminal cash and money mules. The agency indicated it is developing “a more proactive and intelligence-driven capability” to guide its response, suggesting a shift away from managing referrals toward generating its own targets.
Operation Atlantic, conducted at NCA headquarters alongside the United States Secret Service, Coinbase, Binance, Kraken and Tether, identified 20,000 victims of approval phishing and froze $12 million in March. Operation Destabilise, focused on Russian-speaking networks converting cash into cryptocurrencies, resulted in 129 arrests and more than £25 million seized in the United Kingdom.
Privacy Tools
The report also references a paper by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) that emerged from a roundtable convened by the NECC itself in July 2025. The document concludes that banning privacy tools would be counterproductive, as it would push illicit actors toward unregulated services and reduce the number of companies investigators can request information from.
Allison Owen, associate researcher at RUSI and author of the report, argued that building trust through compliance functions “will ultimately expand the use of the technology“.
