The UK’s National Economic Crime Centre says criminals are using crypto products in ways that make it harder for investigators to trace illicit money. In its annual report this week, the NECC, part of the National Crime Agency, warned that laundering networks are mixing new tools with old methods. They move funds through both regulated and unregulated systems at once, often across borders.
Laundering networks become specialized
The report describes a shift in how organized crime handles proceeds. Many groups no longer clean their own money. Instead, they hire dedicated laundering networks and pay a fee. That setup lets the original criminals keep distance from the transaction trail. The NECC also places AI alongside crypto in its threat picture. It points to synthetic identities and automated processes used to get past bank controls. So crypto is not the only concern, but it is part of a broader set of tools.
Cryptoassets now rank third among nine economic crime priorities. The NECC agreed on that list with the Financial Conduct Authority, the Home Office, and the Treasury, and published it in July 2025. The ranking puts crypto above criminal cash and money mules. That matters because it helps steer where regulated firms focus compliance work.
A more proactive crypto capability
The agency says it is building a more proactive and intelligence-led crypto capability. The language suggests a move away from simply responding to referrals and toward generating its own targets. What that looks like in practice is still unclear. The report gives no operational details.
There are some concrete results. Operation Atlantic, a week-long sprint at NCA headquarters 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, which targets Russian-speaking networks converting street cash into crypto, has led to 129 arrests and more than £25 million seized in the UK. That is one more arrest than the update given in November. The NCA now says it will expand the Destabilise approach to other high-harm money laundering networks that pose the greatest illicit finance risk to the UK.
Privacy tools and the limits of bans
The report also lists academic work, including a Royal United Services Institute paper on privacy-enhancing technologies in crypto. The paper came from a July 2025 roundtable hosted by the NECC. It argued against a crackdown. Participants said several times that privacy tools should not be banned. They reasoned that prohibition would push illicit actors onto unregulated services and leave investigators with fewer firms to ask for information. RUSI associate fellow Allison Owen told Decrypt that building trust through compliance features may expand use of the technology.
The overall message is cautious. The NECC sees real abuse of crypto by launderers. At the same time, its own work with privacy researchers suggests that banning tools outright could backfire. For UK authorities, the challenge is to chase bad actors without driving the activity further out of sight.
