New Delhi: Shifting focus toward financial intelligence and dark market tracking at the FutureCrime Summit 2026, experts convened for the afternoon’s fourth panel. Titled “Follow the Money: Crypto Fraud, Financial Crime and AML/CFT Intelligence,” the session addressed the complex investigative and regulatory hurdles of tracking illicit fund flows across decentralized platforms, privacy coins, and cross-border crypto networks.
Decentralized Technologies and AML/CFT Friction
Moderated by Bibhu Pattnaik, Editor & Writer at TheStreet, TechBullion, MSN, New York Post, and Nonce Media, the panel explored the friction between decentralized financial technologies and international anti-money laundering (AML) controls. Pattnaik led the discussion by posing key questions, including: “How have cryptocurrency, stablecoins, and decentralized platforms changed the movement and laundering of criminal proceeds?” and “How can financial-intelligence units improve cross-border exchange of blockchain and transaction intelligence?”
The transition from centralized banking infrastructures to permissionless decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms fundamentally disrupts traditional anti-money laundering tracking. By utilizing cross-chain bridges, decentralized exchanges, and cryptographic tumblers, threat actors establish borderless laundering vectors, forcing financial intelligence units to adapt their surveillance methodologies to trace assets across immutable but pseudo-anonymous public ledgers.
Cross-Border Enforcement and Investigative Transformations
CA Bharat Jeswani, FCA, CFE, CFCS, CAMS, and Founder at AML Consultancy, detailed the structural friction points in cross-border enforcement, highlighting the significant delays currently facing international investigations. He observed that while financial criminals move illicit digital assets instantly across global jurisdictions, formal diplomatic and legal mechanisms—such as Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs) and inter-agency Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) requests—operate at a severely sluggish pace. This bureaucratic delay creates a dangerous operational lag, allowing criminal syndicates ample time to liquidate and scatter stolen assets long before authorities secure the necessary international mandates to freeze them.
Vijayant Gaur, Cybersecurity Expert, argued that security teams and regulatory bodies must adapt to systemic changes in financial crime by fundamentally overhauling their investigative frameworks. He emphasized the urgent need to retrain financial investigators and digital forensic analysts across the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), FIUs, and specialized law enforcement agencies. By integrating advanced blockchain forensics and moving away from traditional fiat-based tracking methods, he stressed that authorities can proactively dissect modern financial fraud networks rather than merely reacting to post-incident losses.
The operational strategy under review relies on bypassing sluggish legacy MLAT procedures by directly integrating blockchain analytics with live law enforcement operations. Establishing rapid, real-time intelligence bridges between crypto exchanges and national FIUs ensures that illicit fund flows can be intercepted at fiat off-ramps before suspects complete their laundering cycles.
Institutional Readiness and Live Investigation Coordination
Providing an operational industry perspective, Gyan Barah, Senior Advisor at Jio Financial Services, offered an encouraging update on institutional readiness within the financial sector. He noted that contemporary financial institutions are continuously working to upgrade their internal monitoring architectures to handle the complexities of digital asset exposure. By actively integrating machine learning-driven fraud detection models and strengthening their regulatory compliance capabilities, these institutions are increasingly equipped to detect anomalous transaction patterns and intercept suspicious fund transfers in real time.
Soham Shah, Founder and CEO of Yellow Stone Solutions, stressed the critical importance of inter-agency speed and responsiveness, declaring that rapid intervention is paramount when tracking crypto-enabled crime. He called for an immediate overhaul of operational execution speeds, urging seamless, live-time coordination between private fintech companies, blockchain analytics firms, and law enforcement agencies. Shah highlighted that without immediate reach across decentralized platforms and immediate data sharing during live investigations, tracing decentralized asset flows remains virtually impossible.
The panel concluded with a strong consensus that countering crypto-enabled crime requires aligning legal execution speeds with technological realities, enhancing cross-agency coordination, and modernizing financial intelligence workflows.
