Britain will recruit 500 officers to trace and seize criminal money, backed by £500 million ($676 million) in funding over three years, the Home Office announced on Tuesday in an official statement.

The funding will support a new Anti-Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Strategy and is drawn from the economic crime levy paid by regulated firms, keeping the cost of the expansion with the regulated sector rather than general taxpayers. The new officers will be spread across police forces, the National Crime Agency (NCA) and the Crown Prosecution Service.

According to the NCA, more than £100 billion is laundered through the UK or British corporate structures each year. The Home Office said the threat "has grown in recent years from the rise of fintech, crypto and AI."

The recruits will build on Operation Destabilise, the investigation into Russian-speaking networks that convert street cash into cryptocurrency on behalf of organized crime groups. The NCA plans a fresh campaign of arrests and cash seizures targeting networks it says enable ransomware groups, hostile states and the class A drugs trade. So far, the operation has led to 119 suspected launderers being arrested and more than £25 million seized in cash and crypto in under a year. Those arrest and seizure tallies are the metric to watch as the new funding and staffing roll out over the next three years.

A growing priority

The NCA publicly called for expanded resources last week. In its annual report, the agency's economic crime centre said criminals were making "innovative use of crypto asset products to evade detection and move illicit value at scale," and said it wanted to extend the Destabilise model to other networks while building "a more proactive and intelligence-led crypto capability." Cryptoassets rank third among the nine economic crime priorities the NCA agreed with the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority.

Sal Melki, the NCA's deputy director for economic crime, said fighting financial crime "has become more complex as criminals embrace new technologies." He added that the investment would fund an "innovative financial intelligence service for the UK" and expand capacity to target criminals' financial architecture.

The government put its returns for the past year at almost £350 stripped from criminals, more than £1 billion denied to them, £26 million returned to victims and nearly 4,000 money laundering convictions.

British agencies have previously partnered with crypto firms on enforcement. Operation Atlantic, run jointly with the US Secret Service, identified 20,000 approval-phishing victims and froze $12 million in assets with Coinbase, Binance, Kraken and Tether during a week-long sprint at NCA headquarters in March — a sign of how platform cooperation has become part of the UK's enforcement toolkit.