UK Backs Money Laundering Crackdown With $676M and 500 New Officers

In brief

• Five hundred officers will be recruited across police forces, the National Crime Agency and the Crown Prosecution Service.
• The £500 million comes from the economic crime levy and runs over three years.
• It will build upon Operation Destabilise, the case against Russian cash-to-crypto networks.

Britain will recruit 500 officers to trace and seize criminal money, backed by £500 million over three years, the Home Office said on Tuesday.

The money funds a new Anti-Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Strategy and comes from the economic crime levy on regulated firms. Officers will be spread across police forces, the National Crime Agency and the Crown Prosecution Service.

The NCA reckons more than £100 billion is laundered through the UK or British corporate structures each year, and the threat "has grown in recent years from the rise of fintech, crypto and AI," the Home Office said.

The officers will build on Operation Destabilise, the investigation into Russian-speaking networks that convert street cash into crypto for organised crime groups, the Home Office said. The NCA plans a fresh campaign of arrests and cash seizures against networks it says enable ransomware groups, hostile states and the class A drugs trade. It puts the operation's tally so far at 119 suspected launderers arrested and more than £25 million seized in cash and crypto in under a year.

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A growing priority

The NCA asked for this in public last week. Its economic crime centre in its annual report that criminals were making "innovative use of crypto asset products to evade detection and move illicit value at scale," and that it wanted to expand the Destabilise model to other networks while building "a more proactive and intelligence-led crypto capability." Cryptoassets rank third on the nine economic crime priorities it agreed with the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority.