Britain will recruit 500 officers to trace and seize criminal money, backed by £500 million over three years, the Home Office announced on Tuesday. The funding supports a new Anti-Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Strategy and comes from the economic crime levy on regulated firms.
The 500 officers will be distributed across police forces, the National Crime Agency and the Crown Prosecution Service. According to the NCA, more than £100 billion is laundered through the UK or British corporate structures annually, with threats growing due to fintech, cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.
The initiative will build on Operation Destabilise, an investigation into Russian-speaking networks that convert cash into cryptocurrency for organised crime groups. The NCA has reported 119 suspected launderers arrested and more than £25 million seized in cash and crypto under the operation in less than a year.
The NCA's economic crime centre identified cryptoassets as the third priority among nine economic crime categories agreed with the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority. Officials stated that criminals are making increasing use of crypto products to evade detection and move illicit value at scale.
Sal Melki, the NCA's deputy director for economic crime, said the investment would fund an innovative financial intelligence service for the UK and expand capacity to target criminals' financial architecture.
In the past year, British agencies reported stripping almost £350 million from criminals, denying criminals more than £1 billion, returning £26 million to victims and securing almost 4,000 money laundering convictions.
Previously, British agencies have collaborated with cryptocurrency firms on enforcement. Operation Atlantic, conducted with the US Secret Service in March, identified 20,000 approval-phishing victims and froze $12 million across Coinbase, Binance, Kraken and Tether.
