Anyone surprised that criminals use Cryptocurrency to launder money?
The NewYorkTimes.com reported that “Smugglers, money launderers and people facing sanctions once relied on diamonds, gold and artwork to store illicit fortunes. The luxury goods could help hide wealth but were cumbersome to move and hard to spend. Now, criminals have a far more practical alternative: stablecoins, a cryptocurrency tied to the U.S. dollar that exists largely beyond traditional financial oversight.” The December 7, 2025 article entitled " How a Cryptocurrency Helps Criminals Launder Money and Evade Sanctions” (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/07/technology/how-a-cryptocurrency-helps-criminals-launder-money-and-evade-sanctions.html) included these comments from New York Times Reporter Aaron Krolik:
A report released in February from Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm, estimated that up to $25 billion in illicit transactions involved stablecoins last year. And as more Russian oligarchs, Islamic State leaders and others have begun using the cryptocurrency, the rise of these dollar-linked tokens threatens to undermine one of America’s most potent foreign policy tools: cutting adversaries off from the dollar and the global banking system.
“Bad actors are moving faster than ever before,” said Ari Redbord, a former Treasury official and the head of policy at TRM Labs, a blockchain data company. Sanctions and other economic penalties, he said, lose force when criminals can move millions with a few clicks.
Governments are racing to contain the activity. Late last month, Britain arrested members of a billion-dollar money-laundering network that purchased a bank in Kyrgyzstan in order to help evade sanctions and facilitate payments in support of Russian military efforts. For a fee, Britain’s National Crime Agency said, the launderers would convert money, often generated from the drug trade, firearm sales and human trafficking, to Tether, the most popular stablecoin.
“These ‘cash to crypto’ swaps are an integral part of a global criminal ecosystem,” said Sal Melki, deputy director for economic crime at the National Crime Agency.
For decades, the Treasury Department has relied on banks and credit card companies to root out illicit financial activity, requiring them to spend billions on compliance measures that track and block groups that are subject to government sanctions — or face enormous fines. Since most of the world’s dollar-denominated trade flows through these regulated channels, transacting with those facing sanctions has been extraordinarily difficult.
Stablecoins bypass this system entirely. Through layers of intermediaries, digital dollars can be moved, swapped and mixed into pools of other funds in ways that are more difficult for the authorities to trace, Mr. Redbord said.
Be careful out there!