Emerging Threat

Washington is increasingly turning U.S. anti-corruption enforcement into an instrument of economic statecraft—a shift that threatens to undercut decades of American efforts to fight illicit activity abroad.

U.S. banks have stepped up monitoring for potential cyberattacks as the U.S. war in Iran grinds on, while Gulf lenders face fresh questions over their preparedness for cyber activity tied to Iran-aligned hacktivists.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) said that stablecoins are now commonly used in money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing schemes, and warned that peer-to-peer transfers via unhosted wallets represent a key vulnerability for the crypto ecosystem. 

Stablecoin issuer Tether said it has frozen about $4.2 billion of its USDT tokens over links to “illicit activity,” with most of the freezes occurring in the past three years, as authorities worldwide intensify efforts to curb crypto-related crime.

Two cryptocurrency exchanges registered in the United Kingdom and marketed as processing more than $1 billion a day were fronted by a purported executive who “doesn’t seem to exist” and was instead portrayed using stock footage, OCCRP reported. 

Autonomous AI “agents” that can initiate and execute transactions without real-time human input are compressing the timelines that anti-money laundering (AML) compliance teams and law enforcement rely on to detect and stop illicit crypto activity.

The messaging platform Telegram has become a hub for job scams and other forms of fraud, Revolut is warning.

A record mismatch in official trade statistics is complicating efforts to measure how far the U.S. and China have “decoupled,” according to Bloomberg, which cited an $112-billion gap between what Beijing said it exported to the United States and what U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded as arriving.

Waste crime and trafficking is expanding globally, fueled by profit incentives in a fast-growing waste-management industry and compounded by major blind spots in official data, according to a newly released report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). 

Australia’s booming cocaine consumption among affluent professionals has helped turn the country into the world’s unlikely cocaine capital, fueling criminal networks linked to murder, human trafficking, and extortion.