Britain is moving crypto closer to the center of its fight against financial crime. The National Economic Crime Centre (NECC), a National Crime Agency unit coordinating the country’s response, says criminals are finding increasingly inventive ways to use crypto to move illicit value while avoiding detection.
In its annual report, published this week, the agency warned that laundering networks are spreading across borders and mixing conventional methods with newer ones. The money can travel through legitimate and criminal systems at the same time, making the job of tracing it considerably messier.
The NECC also says organized crime groups are increasingly outsourcing the laundering of their proceeds. Instead of handling the process themselves, they pay specialist networks to move and disguise the money.
Crypto is now ranked third among nine economic crime priorities agreed by the NECC, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Home Office and the Treasury. The priorities were published in July 2025 and are intended to guide how regulated firms focus their compliance efforts.
That ranking puts crypto ahead of criminal cash and money mules, a sign that British authorities increasingly see digital assets as part of the country’s broader financial crime problem rather than a niche concern.
Why crypto is moving up Britain’s crime priority list
The agency says it is building “a more proactive and intelligence-led crypto capability to inform our response to cross-cutting priorities.”
The wording suggests a shift in strategy: rather than simply responding to referrals, investigators want to generate their own intelligence and identify targets more actively. The report does not explain exactly how that capability will operate.
There are already signs of a more coordinated approach. In March, Operation Atlantic brought the NCA together with the U.S. Secret Service and major crypto firms including Coinbase, Binance, Kraken and Tether.
The week-long operation identified 20,000 victims of approval phishing and helped freeze $12 million.
Another investigation, Operation Destabilise, has focused on Russian-speaking networks that convert street cash into crypto. The operation has so far resulted in 129 arrests and more than £25 million seized in the UK.
The NCA says it plans to extend the Operation Destabilise model to other “high harm money laundering networks which pose the greatest illicit finance risk to the UK.”
That broader push comes as authorities also grapple with a more complicated question: how much privacy should crypto users be allowed to have?
The NECC’s academic work includes a study of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in the crypto industry, produced by the Royal United Services Institute after a roundtable hosted by the agency in July 2025.
Rather than calling for privacy tools to be prohibited, participants argued that banning them could backfire. Criminals might simply move to less regulated services, leaving investigators with fewer companies able to provide useful information.
RUSI associate fellow Allison Owen told Decrypt that stronger compliance features could build trust and “will ultimately expand the use of the technology.”
For Britain, that creates an unusually modern law-enforcement balancing act. Crypto is becoming important enough to rank near the top of the country’s economic crime concerns, but regulators and investigators are also recognizing that pushing privacy technology underground could make illicit finance harder—not easier—to track.