Slava Demchuk

FinCEN found that sub-agents of the A7 Network moved more than $17 billion between January 2025 and June 2026, holding accounts at roughly 435 financial institutions across at least 83 countries. Nothing about that figure fits inside a designated-address lookup, and the crypto sanctions typologies behind it do

Scam operations that paid AI vendors on-chain earned an average of $3.2 million each in 2025, against $719,000 for those with no such links, according to the 2026 Crypto Crime Report from Chainalysis. Only a subset of fraudsters buy tools with traceable crypto, so this is a

An exchange lists USDC. A payment company settles merchants in USDT. A fintech lets customers hold a dollar stablecoin. A company issues its own. A wallet lets users send all of the above. Every one of them “works with stablecoins.” None of them has the same compliance obligations. That is

You did the right thing first. You saved the transaction hashes, the wallet addresses, the screenshots, the chat history, and whatever you know about the platform or person involved. Now comes the part nobody explains: where do I send all of this, and what do I actually tell the police?

You have the transaction hash. You ran a trace, and you are looking at the result: a few wallets, a bridge, maybe an exchange, maybe an unknown endpoint, maybe an address where the funds simply stopped. Then the real question arrives: what can I actually do with this? Crypto tracing

You can watch stolen crypto move in real time and still be unable to stop it. The trail can be completely clear, and tracing gives an investigator none of the things that would actually halt the funds: no private key, no custody, no exchange control, no issuer control, no court

TRM Labs' own product page lists Entity Due Diligence, Wallet Screening, Forensics, Know-Your-Asset, Transaction Monitoring, Bulk Data and Deconflict, alongside the BLOCKINT API, Triage, and an AI assistant for investigations. That is the first thing worth noticing about the phrase "TRM Labs alternatives": it treats

Two AML platforms can both claim wallet screening, transaction monitoring, sanctions detection, broad blockchain coverage, configurable rules, an API and case management. Side by side, the claims look interchangeable. What they do not show is whether both systems attribute the same wallet to the same entity, how many alerts each

Look at three crypto AML vendors with published pricing and you will find three different units. One sells a wallet report for a flat fee per report. Another sells packages measured in requests (10,000, 50,000, 250,000) with the price quoted on enquiry. A third charges roughly a

Most crypto payment gateways settle in stablecoins. So does most crypto crime. In a targeted report published on 3 March 2026, the Financial Action Task Force noted that stablecoins had grown to more than 250 in circulation by mid-2025 with a combined market capitalisation above USD 300 billion — and

The engineering team says they can build it. They already run nodes, parse transactions, and have a data pipeline. How hard can monitoring be? The answer depends on what "monitoring" actually means. If the question is "can we see blockchain transactions?" — most engineering teams with blockchain

There is no single number. A non-custodial wallet provider processing 200 low-risk retail transactions per month and a custodial exchange onboarding business clients across three jurisdictions with continuous multi-chain monitoring are both "crypto startups." Their AML compliance budgets will have almost nothing in common. The

The founder has a clear plan: build the exchange, get the cheapest license, start operating. The licensing consultant sends a proposal — $15,000 all-in, ready in three weeks, offshore jurisdiction with zero corporate tax. It looks like the fastest path to market. 18 months later, the exchange has a

On 23 April 2026, $344 million in USDT stopped moving. Tether blacklisted two addresses on Tron after several U.S. authorities passed it information about activity tied to unlawful conduct, in coordination with OFAC and other law enforcement agencies. The company said this kind of action has become a routine

Ninety-one out of 109. That is how many surveyed jurisdictions had passed legislation implementing the Crypto Travel Rule when FATF published its Seventh Targeted Update on 16 July 2026 — 83%, up from 73% a year earlier, with another 11 jurisdictions reporting that implementation is under way. Read on its

On 8 May 2026, AUSTRAC put numbers on how closely it intended to watch Australia's crypto sector: 36 over-the-counter crypto-to-cash businesses under a supervisory campaign it branded ramps and rails, and 27 local exchanges under a second campaign focused on reform readiness and governance.

A customer passes KYC. Account approved. Risk level assigned. Two weeks later, 40,000 USDC arrives in their account — from a wallet that does not belong to them. The compliance team now has a verified customer and an unverified payment. The identity check answered who opened the account. It did

The AML check returned High Risk. Stolen Funds exposure. The number is there. The category is there. And the next question is not about the score. It is: which transfer created this exposure? Is it connected to the deposit being reviewed — or to something that happened in this wallet'

Nobody migrates a KYT provider because the old one works perfectly. The decision usually follows months of frustration — coverage gaps on chains the business now supports, slow API responses during peak volume, risk categories that do not match how the compliance team actually thinks about risk, alert logic that cannot

Imagine: 3 years ago you bought ETH on an exchange using a bank transfer. You withdrew it to a hardware wallet. Later you swapped half for USDC on a DEX, bridged it to another chain, received freelance payments in the same wallet, sold some through a P2P trade, and now

Intro "My wallet was hacked." Every crypto investigation team hears this sentence multiple times a week. And in almost every case, it describes the outcome — not the diagnosis. The balance was there. The assets moved. The recipient is unknown. The transaction cannot be reversed. From the victim'

You open your wallet and something is there that was not there before. Maybe it is a token you never bought. Maybe a fraction of a dollar in a cryptocurrency you do not recognize. Maybe an NFT from a project you have never heard of. Maybe a small USDT transfer

A user checks one Ethereum address using two different blockchain analytics tools. Platform A shows Low Risk. Platform B shows Medium Risk with mixer exposure flagged. The user then sends funds from that same wallet to an exchange — and the exchange places the deposit under manual review. The blockchain is