AMLBot Academy

A collection of 101 posts

AMLBot Academy

Blockchain Evidence in Court: How to Preserve On-Chain Data and Maintain Chain of Custody

An investigator finds the transaction that moved stolen funds from a victim's wallet. They save a screenshot from a block explorer, copy the transaction hash into a report, build a fund-flow graph, and send the file to the client. Months later, the case reaches a lawyer or

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Smart Contract AML Screening: How to Assess DEXs, Bridges, and DeFi Protocols

A crypto business plans to add DEX routing to its product. The protocol is well known — it has a website, multiple security audits, substantial TVL, and a recognizable brand. The compliance team screens the protocol's main contract address and finds no sanctions match. The integration proceeds. Six months

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Crypto Money Mules and Account Renting: How Verified Accounts Move Illicit Funds

In June 2026, a coordinated investigation supported by Eurojust and Europol shut down a crypto laundering service suspected of processing more than EUR 336 million in criminal proceeds between 2022 and 2025. Ransomware operators sent stolen assets to wallets controlled by the group and received "cleaned" funds back

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Synthetic Identity Fraud in Crypto KYC: How AI Helps Fraudsters Bypass Verification

On November 13, 2024, FinCEN issued alert FIN-2024-Alert004 after a sustained rise in suspicious activity reports describing deepfake media used against financial institutions. The filings, which FinCEN says began increasing in 2023 and continued through 2024, described criminals altering or creating fraudulent identity documents specifically to get past

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AML Compliance for RWA Tokenization: KYC, Wallet Screening, and Secondary-Market Transfers

"Securities, however represented, remain securities... economic reality trumps labels." That line from SEC Chair Paul Atkins, delivered in a November 2025 speech, became the backbone of the joint staff Statement on Tokenized Securities issued on January 28, 2026 — the most detailed regulatory signal to date that putting an

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AI Agent Stablecoin Payments: Who Is Responsible for AML Compliance?

A software agent finds a paid API. It evaluates the price, determines that the data is needed to complete its task, selects a provider, and initiates a stablecoin payment. The USDT leaves the wallet. The provider confirms receipt and returns the data. The agent continues with its work. The blockchain

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Web3 Gaming AML Compliance: Player KYC, Wallet Screening, and In-Game Asset Monitoring

In a traditional game, value stays inside. A player earns a sword, a skin, or in-game currency — and it remains on the platform, usable only within the game, non-transferable, and ultimately controlled by the developer. In a Web3 game, the same sword may be an NFT on Ethereum,

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Crypto Donations and Fundraising: How to Screen Incoming Funds for AML Risk

An organization publishes a wallet address for donations. Transfers begin arriving from different senders — some who identify themselves, some who do not. A blockchain confirmation shows that each transfer was recorded on-chain. It does not show who controls the sending wallet, where the funds originated, which services they passed

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PDF AML Report: When You Need It and What It Can Prove

You checked a wallet address or transaction. The screen showed a risk score, exposure categories, and a sanctions status. The result looked fine — or it raised questions. Either way, the moment passed. Now, weeks later, an exchange asks where a deposit came from. A counterparty wants proof that their address

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AML Software Stack for Growing VASPs: What Compliance Teams Need as Volume Grows

A three-person compliance team reviewing 200+ transactions per day can operate with spreadsheets, manual wallet checks, and email-based escalation. The same team reviewing 5,000+ transactions per day cannot — not because the people are less capable, but because the process was never designed to scale. Alerts pile up.

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USDT TRC-20 AML Check: Why Tron Stablecoin Payments Need Extra Screening

In 2024, the TRON blockchain accounted for 58% of all illicit cryptocurrency transaction volume — more than Ethereum, Bitcoin, and all other chains combined. Of that volume, 49% was linked to sanctioned entities and 32% involved blocklisted funds. Separately, on-chain analytics research found that Tron-based USDT dominated high-risk

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Crypto AML Change Management: How to Keep Compliance Policies and Controls Up to Date

In 2024, U.S. federal banking regulators and FinCEN announced more than three dozen enforcement actions against financial institutions for BSA/AML compliance failures. A recurring theme across those cases was not the absence of an AML program. It was the presence of a program that had not been updated

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Offshore VASP Risk: How Crypto Businesses Should Identify and Manage oVASP Exposure

On 11 March 2026, FATF published its report Understanding and Mitigating the Risks of Offshore Virtual Asset Service Providers, making oVASP exposure a named compliance issue rather than a subcategory of general counterparty risk. The report’s central finding is that fewer than half of global jurisdictions—only 46%—have

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MiCA Transition Period Ends in July 2026: What Happens to Unlicensed Crypto Businesses

Many crypto businesses operating in the EU have been relying on transitional arrangements to continue their activities while preparing for or awaiting MiCA authorization. That window is now closing. On 17 April 2026, ESMA confirmed in a formal statement that the MiCA transitional period will officially expire across the EU

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VARA Licensing in Dubai 2026: AML Requirements for Crypto Businesses in the UAE

Crypto businesses planning to operate in or from Dubai need to understand two connected but distinct questions: whether their activities require VARA authorization, and what compliance controls must function after authorization is obtained. These are not the same question, and the second does not disappear once the first is resolved.

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My Crypto Was Stolen: What Information to Collect Before Asking for Help

When crypto is stolen, the first instinct is often to search for someone who can get it back. That is a natural reaction, but before contacting an exchange, investigator, recovery team, law enforcement, or wallet provider, there is a more immediate and useful step: preserving the information you already have.

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Fake Crypto Recovery Services: How to Avoid Being Scammed Twice

When crypto is stolen, the search for help often starts immediately. People type “recover stolen USDT,” “get my crypto back,” or “crypto recovery service” into a search engine, post about the loss on Telegram or Reddit, or describe what happened in a scam report forum. Within hours or days, unsolicited

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Why Crypto Exchanges Freeze Deposits After AML Checks

A crypto deposit can be fully confirmed on the blockchain and still not appear in your exchange balance. Instead of a credited amount, you see a status message: Under Review, Pending Review, or a notification that the deposit is temporarily unavailable. For most users, this is unexpected and stressful—the

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How to Check a Crypto Wallet for AML Risk Before Sending Funds

Before sending crypto to a wallet address, it is worth asking a question that is easy to overlook: what is the transaction history of that address, and does it show any exposure to suspicious sources? A wallet address is just a string of characters. It can look completely ordinary while

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Jurisdiction Risk in Crypto AML: How Location, Residency, and Business Geography Affect Compliance Reviews

Crypto is often described as borderless, and in a technical sense it is. A blockchain transaction does not care where the sender or receiver is physically located. But for AML compliance, geography remains significant. Compliance reviews look beyond the wallet address and the transaction hash. They look at where the

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A Complete Guide: How to Find Your Transaction ID (TxID / Transaction Hash)

TL;DR: A TxID is a unique code assigned to every blockchain transaction. You find it in your transaction history on any exchange or wallet, usually by clicking on a specific transaction and looking for "TxID", "Transaction Hash", or "Hash". This guide is here

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What to Do If Your Crypto Business Received Tainted Funds

A crypto business may receive funds that later appear connected to scams, hacks, sanctions, darknet markets, mixers, stolen funds, fraud-related wallets, or other high-risk sources. This does not always mean the business did anything wrong. But it does mean the business now has a problem to manage—and

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Sanctions Screening for Crypto Businesses: Wallets, Transactions, Customers, and Counterparties

On October 15, 2021, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control published its first industry-specific brochure on sanctions compliance for the virtual currency industry, setting out the components it expects to see in a sanctions program: management commitment, risk assessment, internal controls, testing

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Launching a Crypto Startup? AML Checklist for Exchanges, Wallets, Payment Apps, and DeFi Products

The phrase “crypto startup” tells you almost nothing about which AML obligations apply. A four-person team building a custodial swap interface, a payment processor settling stablecoin invoices for merchants, a token issuer running a redemption desk, and a non-custodial DEX front end all describe themselves the same way

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Counterparty VASP Due Diligence: A Practical Guide for Crypto Businesses

In its June 2025 Targeted Update on Virtual Assets, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) reported that 85 of 117 responding jurisdictions — about 73% — had passed Travel Rule legislation, up from 65 a year earlier. The number is rising, but it carries a quieter message for anyone moving crypto between