Britain’s National Economic Crime Centre, or NECC, said in its annual report this week that criminals are making “innovative use of crypto asset products to evade detection and move illicit value at scale.”
The comment appeared in a threat assessment that described laundering networks spreading across borders and combining “novel and traditional” methods, while moving funds through licit and illicit systems at the same time. The agency said many organized crime groups no longer launder their own proceeds and instead outsource that work to dedicated networks for a fee.
The same passage put AI alongside crypto, pointing to synthetic identities and process automation used against banks.
Crypto climbs to No. 3 among NECC economic crime priorities
According to the report, cryptoassets now rank third among nine economic crime priorities agreed by the NECC with the Financial Conduct Authority, the Home Office and HM Treasury, and published in July 2025.
The list is used to steer where regulated firms focus their compliance effort. In that ranking, crypto sits above criminal cash and money mules.
The NECC said it is developing “a more proactive and intelligence-led crypto capability to inform our response to cross-cutting priorities.” The wording suggests a shift away from simply working referrals and toward generating its own targets, though the report gave no detail on what that means operationally.
Operation Atlantic and Operation Destabilise updates
The report said Operation Atlantic was a week-long sprint held at National Crime Agency headquarters with the U.S. Secret Service, Coinbase, Binance, Kraken and Tether. In March, the operation identified 20,000 approval-phishing victims and froze $12 million.
It also gave an update on Operation Destabilise, the case targeting Russian-speaking networks that convert street cash into crypto. The agency said the operation has now reached 129 arrests and more than £25 million seized in the UK, one more arrest than in the update released in November.
The NECC said it will now expand the Operation Destabilise approach to other “high harm money laundering networks which pose the greatest illicit finance risk to the UK.”
Report references research opposing a ban on privacy tools
Among the academic work listed in the annual report was a Royal United Services Institute, or RUSI, paper on privacy-enhancing technologies in the crypto industry.
That paper came out of a July 2025 roundtable hosted by the NECC itself and argued against a crackdown on such tools.
Participants said “several times” that privacy tools should not be banned because prohibition would push illicit actors onto unregulated services and leave investigators with fewer firms 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.”