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.”

The NECC, a unit of the National Crime Agency that coordinates the UK’s response to economic crime, made the assessment in its annual report, published this week. The report describes laundering networks proliferating across borders and combining “novel and traditional” methods to move money through legitimate and illicit systems simultaneously.

Many organized crime groups no longer launder their own proceeds, according to the agency. Instead, they outsource the work to dedicated networks in exchange for a fee. The same threat assessment identifies artificial intelligence alongside crypto, citing the use of synthetic identities and automated processes against banks.

NECC developing crypto capability

Cryptoassets rank third among nine economic crime priorities agreed by the NECC, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Home Office and the Treasury and published in July 2025. The list guides where regulated firms direct their compliance efforts, placing crypto ahead of criminal cash and money mules.

The agency said it is developing “a more proactive and intelligence-led crypto capability to inform our response to cross-cutting priorities.” The wording indicates a shift away from relying primarily on referrals and toward generating its own targets, although the report provides no details about how the capability will operate.

Operation Atlantic, a week-long effort conducted 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. The operation was previously reported by Decrypt: https://decrypt.co/363878/operation-atlantic-us-uk-agencies-trace-freeze-millions-stolen-crypto

Operation Destabilise, which targeted Russian-speaking networks converting street cash into crypto, has resulted in 129 arrests and more than £25 million seized in the UK. That is one more arrest than the figure in an update issued in November. The agency said it would extend the Operation Destabilise approach to other “high harm money laundering networks which pose the greatest illicit finance risk to the UK.”

Debate over crypto privacy tools

The report also cites academic work by the Royal United Services Institute, including its report Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in Crypto Industry. The paper followed a July 2025 roundtable hosted by the NECC and argued against banning crypto privacy tools.

Participants said “several times” that privacy tools should not be prohibited. They argued that a ban would push illicit actors toward unregulated services and leave investigators with fewer companies from which to request information. Allison Owen, a RUSI associate fellow and the paper’s author, told Decrypt that building trust through compliance features “will ultimately expand the use of the technology.”

Official NECC information:

Source: https://decrypt.co/377757/uk-crime-agency-warns-of-innovative-use-of-crypto-by-launderers