As the year came to a close, the Kharon Brief asked a range of industry leaders to assess 2025’s biggest storylines and what’s coming in 2026 in sanctions, risk and compliance.
Ari Redbord is the global head of policy at TRM Labs.
Looking back at 2025, the defining storyline in my world is that scams became the dominant illicit-finance threat in crypto—and governments finally started responding at the scale the problem demands. We stopped treating scams as police work and started treating them as an existential, national-security-level threat.
According to TRM, we’ve seen more than $50 billion in scam activity since 2023, and 2025 is another record-setting year. Yes, hacks were enormous—roughly $2.7 billion across bridges, protocols and centralized platforms—but the day-to-day human harm sits squarely in pig-butchering, investment fraud, “safe account” schemes and social-engineering campaigns that exploit trust at industrial scale.
What changed in 2025 is that we saw the beginnings of a whole-of-government, whole-of-world approach. Treasury, DOJ, FBI, HSI, FinCEN, OFAC and international partners treated scams not as isolated incidents but as a global financial-crime ecosystem. The Prince Group takedown was the clearest example: a worldwide scam facilitation and laundering network disrupted through coordinated action by DOJ, Treasury and law-enforcement agencies abroad, with the U.K. playing a central role in sanctions, intelligence and operational support. That case resulted in the largest-ever forfeiture action—against $15 billion—in history. At the same time, DOJ stood up a Scam Center Strike Force focused specifically on the networks behind pig-butchering and cross-border fraud, matching investigative resources to the scale of the threat.
Treasury used its most powerful tools—311 actions, sanctions designations and illicit-finance authorities—to target crypto OTC brokers, cash-out networks, and nodes that sit at the center of fraud and laundering flows. The U.K. brought major cases, including against Prince Group, tied to pig-butchering infrastructure. And across the board we saw indictments, disruptions, account seizures and coordinated takedowns at a pace we simply have not seen before.
Looking ahead, the most pressing challenge is the way AI is now supercharging illicit activity, including pig-butchering networks. Scammers, laundering networks and ransomware groups are already using AI to personalize social-engineering scripts, automate recruiting, generate deepfakes and innovate laundering pathways faster than any human investigator can follow in real time. The asymmetry is widening.
That’s why 2026 must be the year we meet AI with AI, embedding machine-speed analytics, anomaly detection and risk signals into the operating systems of exchanges, platforms, banks and law enforcement. And it requires public–private disruption models like Beacon Network, where information can move across institutions in seconds, not weeks.
If criminals are going to industrialize their operations with AI, then defenders must build collective, rapid-response systems that move just as fast.
Ari Redbord is the global head of policy at TRM Labs.
Looking back at 2025, the defining storyline in my world is that scams became the dominant illicit-finance threat in crypto—and governments finally started responding at the scale the problem demands. We stopped treating scams as police work and started treating them as an existential, national-security-level threat.
According to TRM, we’ve seen more than $50 billion in scam activity since 2023, and 2025 is another record-setting year. Yes, hacks were enormous—roughly $2.7 billion across bridges, protocols and centralized platforms—but the day-to-day human harm sits squarely in pig-butchering, investment fraud, “safe account” schemes and social-engineering campaigns that exploit trust at industrial scale.
What changed in 2025 is that we saw the beginnings of a whole-of-government, whole-of-world approach. Treasury, DOJ, FBI, HSI, FinCEN, OFAC and international partners treated scams not as isolated incidents but as a global financial-crime ecosystem. The Prince Group takedown was the clearest example: a worldwide scam facilitation and laundering network disrupted through coordinated action by DOJ, Treasury and law-enforcement agencies abroad, with the U.K. playing a central role in sanctions, intelligence and operational support. That case resulted in the largest-ever forfeiture action—against $15 billion—in history. At the same time, DOJ stood up a Scam Center Strike Force focused specifically on the networks behind pig-butchering and cross-border fraud, matching investigative resources to the scale of the threat.
Treasury used its most powerful tools—311 actions, sanctions designations and illicit-finance authorities—to target crypto OTC brokers, cash-out networks, and nodes that sit at the center of fraud and laundering flows. The U.K. brought major cases, including against Prince Group, tied to pig-butchering infrastructure. And across the board we saw indictments, disruptions, account seizures and coordinated takedowns at a pace we simply have not seen before.
Looking ahead, the most pressing challenge is the way AI is now supercharging illicit activity, including pig-butchering networks. Scammers, laundering networks and ransomware groups are already using AI to personalize social-engineering scripts, automate recruiting, generate deepfakes and innovate laundering pathways faster than any human investigator can follow in real time. The asymmetry is widening.
That’s why 2026 must be the year we meet AI with AI, embedding machine-speed analytics, anomaly detection and risk signals into the operating systems of exchanges, platforms, banks and law enforcement. And it requires public–private disruption models like Beacon Network, where information can move across institutions in seconds, not weeks.
If criminals are going to industrialize their operations with AI, then defenders must build collective, rapid-response systems that move just as fast.
