Criminals are exploiting gaps in global regulation to move billions of dollars in illicit proceeds through the crypto industry, the Financial Action Task Force said Thursday in its latest review of virtual assets and illicit finance. FinancialMediaGuide views the report as confirmation that despite years of tightening rules in individual countries, crypto-enabled crime is scaling faster than the patchwork of national regulatory regimes meant to contain it.
The Paris-based intergovernmental anti-money-laundering group said crypto-enabled crime has become more “complex and interconnected” over the past year, with regulators, financial institutions and crypto companies facing “significant and ongoing challenges” in detecting and stopping money-laundering flows tied to scam compounds and investment fraud networks.
There has been some improvement in the number of countries following FATF’s recommendations: as of April 2026, 51 of 149 jurisdictions assessed were “largely compliant” with the group’s crypto standards, just over a third, up from 29% the previous year. FinancialMediaGuide notes that even with this improvement, roughly two-thirds of assessed jurisdictions still fall short of full compliance, leaving wide gaps that illicit actors can route transactions through almost regardless of how strict any single country’s rules become.
FATF said “significant gaps” remain in translating risk assessments into concrete steps to reduce crypto crime, and flagged a rise in the use of stablecoins by illicit actors, including some criminal networks developing their own stablecoins specifically designed to resist being frozen or seized by authorities.
The warning is consistent with separate data from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, which estimated that illicit cryptocurrency addresses received at least $154 billion in 2025, a 162% increase from the prior year, driven largely by a 694% surge in value received by sanctioned entities. Financial Media Guide points out that this alignment between FATF’s regulatory warning and Chainalysis’s transaction-level data suggests the acceleration in illicit crypto flows is a measurable trend rather than an anecdotal impression drawn from a handful of high-profile cases.
Chainalysis found that stablecoins now account for 84% of all illicit crypto transaction volume, and separately identified a ruble-backed stablecoin known as A7A5 that processed roughly $93 billion in settlement flows in under a year, describing it as a key channel for sanctions evasion. Even so, Chainalysis noted that illicit activity still represents less than 1% of total crypto transaction volume, underscoring that the dollar figures, while large in absolute terms, remain a small fraction of the broader digital-asset economy.
Taken together, the FATF review and the Chainalysis data point to the same structural problem: criminal and state-linked actors are professionalizing their use of crypto rails faster than the international compliance system can adapt. FinancialMediaGuide concludes that closing the compliance gap identified by FATF, rather than simply tightening rules in already-compliant jurisdictions, is likely to be the central test of global crypto regulation over the next several years.
