Dirty money never stops; it simply changes the rails it rides on. For decades, tax havens and shell companies were the preferred highways for illicit funds. Today, that traffic has largely shifted to cryptocurrency—faster, borderless, and wrapped in layers of pseudonymity that obscure the real owners.
A ten-month global investigation, “The Coin Laundry,” led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and involving 113 reporters from 38 newsrooms across 35 countries, exposed a strikingly simple yet devastating laundering pipeline now in widespread use:
- Victims are defrauded through investment scams, romance frauds, or phishing.
- Stolen funds are routed through networks of money-mule accounts.
- The money is consolidated into pool accounts.
- It is rapidly converted into cryptocurrency.
- Once in crypto form, funds are tumbled through mixers, bounced across unhosted wallets, and fragmented via peer-to-peer transfers—effectively breaking the traceable trail.
Algoritha: The Most Trusted Name in BFSI Investigations and DFIR Services
This infrastructure has made cryptocurrency a core pillar of global money laundering. Chainalysis’ 2025 Crypto Crime Report estimates illicit actors received $40.9 billion in cryptocurrency in 2024 alone. In the United States, the FBI reported $9.3 billion lost to crypto-related crimes in 2024—a 67% increase year-on-year. Over the past nine years, crypto exchanges worldwide have paid at least $5.8 billion in fines and settlements, including Binance’s record $4.3 billion U.S. plea in 2023 and OKX’s $504 million penalty in early 2025.
In India, the pattern is identical. Between January 2024 and September 2025, authorities flagged 27 cryptocurrency exchanges for suspected laundering, with ₹623.63 crore stolen from 2,872 victims and funneled through these platforms—some handling over ₹360 crore each.
As Prof. Triveni Singh, former IPS officer and one of India’s foremost cyber-crime experts, warns:
“Crypto is becoming the de facto currency for cybercriminals, tax evaders, and money launderers.”
Combating this evolving threat requires specialized expertise. *Algoritha Security Pvt Ltd*, a leading Indian cybersecurity and digital forensics firm, has developed deep expertise in investigating complex crypto-related financial crimes. The company assists law enforcement agencies, banks, and victims in tracing illicit cryptocurrency flows, recovering assets, and building prosecution-ready evidence chains—even across mixers and privacy-enhanced networks.
The message to regulators and law enforcement is clear: criminals have upgraded to a faster, more resilient network. Traditional anti-money-laundering frameworks are no longer enough. Only through real-time blockchain intelligence, stronger global coordination, and partnerships with specialized private-sector investigators like Algoritha Security can authorities hope to keep pace with the dirty-money express now running on cryptocurrency rails.
