The UK’s National Economic Crime Centre (NECC), part of the National Crime Agency (NCA), has warned that criminals are making “innovative use of crypto asset products” to evade detection and move illicit value at scale, ranking cryptoassets as the third-biggest economic crime priority in its latest annual report.
The priority list, agreed with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Home Office and the Treasury in July 2025, places cryptoassets above criminal cash and money mules. Only professional enablers, corrupt lawyers and accountants, and politically exposed persons rank higher. The report says many organised crime groups now outsource laundering to specialised networks rather than laundering funds themselves, while artificial intelligence is cited as another risk vector through synthetic identities and automated attacks on the banking system.
The NECC is shifting toward a more proactive, intelligence-led crypto capability, moving beyond referral-based responses to generate its own targets. The report highlights Operation Atlantic, a March operation with the United States Secret Service, Coinbase, Binance, Kraken and Tether, which identified 20,000 approval-phishing victims, froze $12 million, and took down more than 120 scam domains. Separately, Operation Destabilise, focused on Russian-speaking networks converting street cash into cryptocurrency, has produced 129 arrests and more than £25 million in cash and cryptoasset seizures across the UK since 2022.
The NECC also referenced a report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), which emerged from a July 2025 roundtable. The paper argues that banning crypto privacy tools would be counterproductive, pushing illicit actors toward unregulated services and reducing the number of companies from which investigators can request information. RUSI researcher Allison Owen said building trust through compliance functions “will ultimately expand the use of the technology.”
