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The Almighty Buck

How a Cryptocurrency Helps Criminals Launder Money and Evade Sanctions (nytimes.com) 95

Posted by msmash from the what-sanctions dept.
An investigation has revealed how stablecoins -- cryptocurrencies pegged to the US dollar that exist largely beyond traditional financial oversight -- have become a practical tool for criminals and sanctioned individuals to move funds across borders almost instantly and convert them back into spendable money, often without detection.

A Chainalysis report from February estimated that up to $25 billion in illicit transactions involved stablecoins last year. A New York Times reporter tested the system by converting $40 cash at a crypto ATM in Weehawken, New Jersey, into stablecoins and then using a Telegram bot to generate a Visa payment card without any identity verification. The card-issuing service, WantToPay, is incorporated in Hong Kong and led by a Russian entrepreneur in Thailand; it advertises to Russians blocked by US sanctions. Britain last month arrested members of a billion-dollar money laundering network that had purchased a bank in Kyrgyzstan to convert proceeds from drug trafficking and human trafficking into Tether, the most popular stablecoin.

Further reading: China's Central Bank Flags Money Laundering and Fraud Concerns With Stablecoins.
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How a Cryptocurrency Helps Criminals Launder Money and Evade Sanctions More

How a Cryptocurrency Helps Criminals Launder Money and Evade Sanctions

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  • In other news (Score:5, Funny)

    by ThurstonMoore ( 605470 ) on Monday December 08, 2025 @12:10PM (#65843421)

    Water has been found to be wet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Mod parent funny.

      And Ponzi schemes are sure to collapse.

    • In other, other news the Reform party recently declared a £9 million donation from the CEO of Tether, the largest ever single political donation in UK history. If one looks at the date the donation was made - rather than when it was declared - one can see the leader of Reform started to publicly speak favourably about cryptocurrency shortly after receiving the money. Mr Farage continues to maintain that the donor does not expect anything in return. In other, other, other news, the sky is in fact

    • Wait, what? Water is wet? OMG! That explains so much.

  • Ah, yes? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday December 08, 2025 @12:16PM (#65843447)

    This has been going on since crapto became big enough and its likely a main reason crapto is still around? Crime-support in the from of tax evasion, crime financing and money-laundering was always a major application scenario for crapto. Obviously, it also serves as a scam vessel by "value" manipulation (see Musk and Trump, for examples doing that).

    • Re:Ah, yes? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Monday December 08, 2025 @12:21PM (#65843471)

      Does trump do "value manipulation"? I thought he just keep selling shitty memecoins worth nothing for hundreds of millions of dollars to buyers with unknown identity for real money.

      In other words, it is a quid-pro-quo clear-cut bribery system, running which should sink any politician in a democratic country straight to jail without collecting $200.

      • Yeah, but Trump's our guy, and I appreciate how honest he is in his corruption.

        • The stunning thing is that his base have no trouble at all with his corruption and applaud his "openness".

        • Imagine, that used to be called "shameless" just a few generations back even among his base.

          Although I guess it was used in the same sense and with more than a little envy.

    • Re:Ah, yes? (Score:5, Funny)

      by PackMan97 ( 244419 ) on Monday December 08, 2025 @12:24PM (#65843485)
      Wow, incredible FUD-level take, my friend. Classic pre-bull-run cope. You’re basically signal-boosting exactly why decentralized, permissionless, trust-minimized Web3 asset-class primitives are eating TradFi’s lunch.

      You’re out here talking about “crime” while the blockchain ledger is literally a 24/7 globally distributed transparency engine with immutable consensus finality backed by cryptographic game theory. Meanwhile the legacy fiat system is running on opaque black-box middlemen, fractional-reserve rehypothecation loops, and settlement rails from the 1970s.

      But sure, tell me more about how “crapto” is the issue.

      If you actually understood tokenomics, zk-rollups, MEV-resistant L2 throughput optimization, cross-chain liquidity routing, or even—honestly—basic Byzantine-fault tolerance, you’d realize your whole argument gets rugged harder than an undercollateralized meme-token farm.

      Musk and Trump? Please. That’s surface-layer normie noise. We’re over here building decentralized autonomous value-accrual ecosystems secured by incentivized validator nodes operating in a hyperdeflationary post-halving macro cycle. Touch grass and read a whitepaper.

      But it’s okay. Not everyone is ready for a future of unstoppable composable smart-contract ecosystems and sovereign digital self-custody. Some folks are still stuck running TradFi firmware version 1.0.

      Stay safe out there. Remember:
      Blockchain doesn’t care about feelings — only consensus.

      -----
      Hey, there are some things ChatGTP is good for...one of them was generating this awesome response!

    • What would you do about it? Would you support banning crapto? Would that be as successful as the war on drugs?

    • This has been going on since crapto became big enough and its likely a main reason crapto is still around? Crime-support in the from of tax evasion, crime financing and money-laundering was always a major application scenario for crapto. Obviously, it also serves as a scam vessel by "value" manipulation (see Musk and Trump, for examples doing that).

      Not to mention ransomware payments, which are always demanded in crypto form.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Yep, that is part of the money-laundering. The only reason ransomware payments went up dramatically is that with crapto you could finally launder large amounts of money. Before they were laughably low, like the $200 demand a person I know got. On that you cannot grow a larger criminal enterprise.

    • This has been going on since crapto became big enough and its likely a main reason crapto is still around?

      If the question mark at the end of a statement is intended to reveal an effeminate degree of indecision, it's doing its job.

  • Keeping prying eyes out of our personal business is one of the good things about crypto. We need to be able to interact without asking for approval from the state

  • Money laundering is the backbone of the entire cryptocurrency market. Although Trump has made corruption into a strong contender.

    The greatest rap channel on YouTube, Patrick Boyle's, has a video about one of the major scams collapsing because the big boys have integrated crypto into sectors of our economy so there isn't enough excitement about it anymore to keep some of the financial scams going.

    Also with the economy collapsing due to incompetent mismanagement from on high the stock market's going w

    • There are two cryptocurrencies that functionally specialize in helping criminals launder money and evade sanctions, Monero and zcash. They are inherently untraceable and can work as a one-stop money laundromat once you can get currency in and out of them, and the subset of cryptobros who are trying to take cryptocurrency mainstream don't want you to know this. A little money laundering flaring up with some random stablecoin is background noise in the criminal finance world of cryptocurrency.

    • Read the actual Chainalysis report cited in the summary. Then get back to us. Here's a hint: money laundering accounts for less than 1% of all blockchain activity.

  • I think this is the point of cryptocurrencies. They want to be free of government interference. Sanctions are a form of government interference. It's working as intended.

    • Fully agree! Also, countries printing money and making their currencies worthless is one of the things that contributed first to the birth, and then the growth, of crypto

      Also, while I don't support the Russian war in Ukraine, trying to sanction countries and get them off international exchanges has contributed to this. Who does the sanctioning? We don't like what Russia is doing in Ukraine, but also, Leftist governments in the West disapprove of Uganda's anti-LGBTQ policies. So they then get to sancti

      • Which is why all the crypto bros work so hard to make it easy to swap their crypto for fiat currency. Amirite?

      • We don't like what Russia is doing in Ukraine, but also, Leftist governments in the West disapprove of Uganda's anti-LGBTQ policies. So they then get to sanction Uganda?

        Yeah, that's how it works.

        What we are observing is a neo-colonial trend by Western countries to force others to toe their line.

        Sure. But is it wrong to refuse to do business with a regressive country? Should a nation be forced to do business with a nation whose goals run counter to their ideals?

        If the West has such a problem w/ Russia, greenlight Ukraine to bomb Moscow: that alone should bring Russia to its knees

        1) the US promised to protect Ukraine if they gave up nukes
        2) Russia still has nukes

        • By all means, don't do business w/ countries you have a problem with. Interestingly, nobody has the cojones to sanction/boycott China, which is far more venal than either Russia or Uganda. But there's also the policy of forced boycotts: like if an American disagrees w/ you, and wants to trade w/ a Russian citizen or company, he can't, w/o inviting punitive government action against him. It's not just US dealing w/ countries it may not like: it's individual citizens dealing w/ individual citizens of those

          • "If Beijing wanted, they could just send the PLA to occupy Siberia, and Putin couldn't do a thing about it"

            China is not stupid enough to tip their hand. They will continue preying on Russia by doing sleazy business with them (like selling them the tires that got their advance stuck in the mud) as long as they can first.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by RobinH ( 124750 )
        To be fair, throughout history when countries didn't get along (which was most of the time) they solved it by throwing young men into meat grinders to achieve their aims. The idea [wikipedia.org] after WWII was to stop using armed conflict to settle disputes and do it with monetary coercion. This was a much better deal for young military-age men the world over. The fact that Russia gave a big F U to the western world and its monetary policy, and started throwing young men into a meat grinder again, is a disheartening de

    • I want to be free of government interference so I can then swap my crypto for fiat currency!

    • I think this is the point of cryptocurrencies. They want to be free of government interference. Sanctions are a form of government interference. It's working as intended.

      That, and speculation. So far those seem to be the only uses for cryptocurrencies.

  • 1. Your $40 transaction via crypto ATM is identifiable an traceable. You just haven't risen to the level of anyone caring enough to put in the effort.

    2. Laundering money through a crypto ATM may be feasible for the corner drug dealer's few hundred dollars. But, you'll have a much harder time doing it with tens of thousands or millions of dollars.

    The point: Yes, there are criminals using this payment system for illegal activities. But we can say the same thing about Visa. The "crypto bad cuz criminals" attit

    • The difference is that Visa transactions are overwhelmingly for non-criminal purposes, while cryptocurrency transaction are (excluding wash trades) overwhelmingly for criminal purposes.

      I'll just leave these here:

      https://www.nytimes.com/2025/1... [nytimes.com]

      https://www.rand.org/pubs/comm... [rand.org]

      https://www.dw.com/en/north-ko... [dw.com]

      https://www.queensu.ca/iigr/re... [queensu.ca]

      https://www.moneylaundering.co... [moneylaundering.com]

      • while cryptocurrency transaction are (excluding wash trades) overwhelmingly for criminal purposes.

        I'd say that the majority of crypto transactions, by far, are speculative trading.

        But, I do agree that there are not a lot of criminal transactions.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by wagnerer ( 53943 )

        Overwhelmingly? The only link that had real meat to it was the money laundering one and event that had the big detractors putting it at ~ 1% of transactions where as the formal surveys still put it at 0.25%. Fiat money is estimated to be used at 2-5% of all transactions.

        • I guess you missed this part:

          The firm’s findings still contrast strongly with those put forward by three Australia-based academics, who estimated in 2019 that based on transactional data from 2009 to 2017, one-quarter of all 106 million Bitcoin users engaged in crime, and that by 2018, illicit finance accounted for around $76 billion a year, or roughly half, of all transactions in bitcoins.

          Cryptocurrencies have transformed drug trafficking by enabling crime syndicates to cut out street dealers and sell directly to customers around the world through darknet markets, as well as peddle higher-quality narcotics, said Sean Foley, a finance professor at Macquarie University in Sydney and one of the report’s authors.

          “Chainalysis is trying to tell us about the total consumption of cocaine in Australia by telling us about how much cocaine has been seized,” Foley said. “It’s very difficult for me to meaningfully comment on the methodology because they don’t really tell you what they do.”

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 )

      Visa and MC doing business with a sanctioned Russian entity is a much bigger deal.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by davidwr ( 791652 )

      >2. Laundering money through a crypto ATM may be feasible for the corner drug dealer's few hundred dollars. But, you'll have a much harder time doing it with tens of thousands or millions of dollars.

      If you are running a multi-million-dollar criminal enterprise, you may be able to skip the dollars entirely. Just deliver the goods and demand payment in a relatively untraceable cryptocurrency. From what I read in mainstream media, that's how the enterprises that sell ransomware-as-a-service tools operate.

  • Are in high positions of power. https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]

  • to explain how it works to them.

  • Who would have thought that anonymous currencies can be used to move money without people knowing where it is coming from and where it is going to?

  • This has to be a marketing post because the idea that crypto is anonymous and therefore a good tool for crime is a technical falsehood. Doing crime on the blockchain simply creates a permanent and public receipt for the illegal transaction.

    The "regulatory arbitrage" that existed in crypto no longer exists. The governments of the world have the tools to track all online transactions. This feels like an ad for a honeypot.

    As usual the New York Times are promoting the existence of a market condition that no l

    • Reminder to all readers: Monero and zcash exist, off-chain transactions (including cash-for-wallet deals) exist.

      • I'm sorry but they can invent all of the jargon they want. In order to avoid the same person spending a single token more than once requires a centralized process of regulating the transaction. That process has to be connected to the internet and is therefore capable of being monitored by The Five Eyes.

        The CEO of Binance was arrested, charged and found guilty of money laundering for terrorists and drug cartels and was sentenced to, a ridiculously short, 4 months. And then he got a pardon the same week that

    • As GameboyRMH pointed out in his reply above this one [slashdot.org], cash-for-wallet deals exist.

      Granted, cash-for-wallet depends on trusting the person you are buying the wallet from. This greatly limits the practical use. But it is doable if you have some way of enforcing payment if the wallet turns out to be bad or if a previous owner kept a copy then spends it before you do. Those methods could range from the above-board like keeping escrow accounts until the wallet was emptied to the clearly-illegal mob tactics (

  • Nobody needs to know when crypto gets moved into a politician's wallet.

    Alternately, everybody knows when a politician creates an entirely new cryptocurrency, and receives millions of dollars as a side effect of the launch, and yet nobody investigates the source of the money.

    Even after a record number of pardons are issued to criminals with no redeeming qualities.

  • Cryptocurrency has no legitimate uses
    It's only uses are gambling, crime and fraud

  • Visa/MC Liable (Score:4, Interesting)

    by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <slashdot@kSTRAWeirstead.org minus berry> on Monday December 08, 2025 @02:17PM (#65843795)

    Correct me if I am wrong, but Visa and Mastercard are obligated to immediately stop doing business with WantToPay as soon as they are informed that they are bypassing US sanctions.. otherwise Visa and MC themselves start to become liable as well.

  • You're telling me a supposedly untraceable currency is being used by criminals who want to convert their funds into untraceable currency? I am shocked I tell you!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by davidwr ( 791652 )

      >I am shocked I tell you!
      he says as someone hands him the address of a bitcoin wallet, saying "your payment, sir."

  • Dear leader and his sons are fully into crypto...wonder why, oh wait that because none of them have any integrity.
    Personally I loved the "Rump" watch that someone bought from Dear Leader at a grossly inflated price for a junk watch.

    Better yet, they have set up an "exchange" where they are the middleman and take a cut of everyone's transactions, MORE Grift.

    Now he wants government owned businesses on government land competing with private companies...COMMUNISM , FULL STEAM AHEAD.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by davidwr ( 791652 )

      >Now he wants government owned businesses on government land competing with private companies...
      This is nothing new. Granted, it's closer to lowercase-c-communism than it is to old-school-pre-Trump GOP lower-case-c-conservatism, but it's not new.

      The US government and government-owned enterprises have been in direct competition with private enterprises for a long time. One obvious example is the Post Office's package-delivery business which competes with FedEx, UPS, and others.

      Ditto government land being

      • USPS is to meet international obligations.
        Courrier companies came much later and just took the profitable stuff then pointed finger at USPS and say "See how we are better" while not having to carry the loss making international shipments (post).

  • Cryptocurrency is specifically intended for the use of people who don't want Xi, Putin, Trump, Modi or God-help-you von der Leyen deciding how and where they put and use their money. If govenments couldn't resist using the monetary system for spying on and controlling their citizens, crypto wouldn't have much of a draw.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by davidwr ( 791652 )

      The biggest draw I can see for me to use any cryptocurrency is to be used as a short-term method of exchange where fiat currency is not practical or too expensive. For example, if I want to send a $1000 graduation gift to my nephew who lives overseas, it's unsafe to send him a stack of $100 bills by mail, international money orders are no longer sold by the US Post Office, and bank-based and Venmo-like services charge tens of dollars on that amount, which is a fee I would like to avoid. So I'll buy him $1

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