Amatriciana: Exploiting Temporal GNNs for Robust and Efficient Money Laundering Detection

Money laundering is a financial crime that poses a serious threat to financial integrity and social security. The growing number of transactions makes it necessary to use automatic tools that help law enforcement agencies detect such criminal activity. In this work, we present Amatriciana, a nove...

U.S. Sanctions Funnull for $200M Romance Baiting Scams Tied to Crypto Fraud

The U.S. Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control OFAC has levied sanctions against a Philippines-based company named Funnull Technology Inc. and its administrator Liu Lizhi for providing infrastructure to conduct romance baiting scams that led to massive cryptocurrency losses. T...

The Internet’s Biggest-Ever Black Market Just Shut Down Amid a Telegram Purge

Following a WIRED inquiry, Telegram banned thousands of accounts used for crypto-scam money laundering, including those of Haowang Guarantee, a black market that enabled over $27 billion in transactions...

Xinbi Telegram Market Tied to $8.4B in Crypto Crime, Romance Scams, North Korea Laundering

A Chinese-language, Telegram-based marketplace called Xinbi Guarantee has facilitated no less than $8.4 billion in transactions since 2022, making it the second major black market to be exposed after HuiOne Guarantee. According to a report published by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, merchant...

An $8.4 Billion Chinese Hub for Crypto Crime Is Incorporated in Colorado

Before a crackdown by Telegram, Xinbi Guarantee grew into one of the internet’s biggest markets for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers and money laundering. And all registered to a US address...

Germany Shuts Down eXch Over $1.9B Laundering, Seizes €34M in Crypto and 8TB of Data

Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office aka Bundeskriminalamt or BKA has seized the online infrastructure and shutdown linked to the eXch cryptocurrency exchange over allegations of money laundering and operating a criminal trading platform. The operation was carried out on April 30, 2025,...

Topological Analysis of Mixer Activities in the Bitcoin Network

Cryptocurrency users increasingly rely on obfuscation techniques such as mixers, swappers, and decentralised or no-KYC exchanges to protect their anonymity. However, at the same time, these services are exploited by criminals to conceal and launder illicit funds. Among obfuscation services, mixer...

Money Laundering 101, and why Joe is worried

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Howdy friends! One of things I learned early on in cyber security is that crime does, in fact, pay. It can pay very well, actually. If it didn't, we wouldn't have ransomware cartels raking in obscene amounts of money year after year...

U.S. Treasury Lifts Tornado Cash Sanctions Amid North Korea Money Laundering Probe

The U.S. Treasury Department has announced that it's removing sanctions against Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixer service that has been accused of aiding the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group to launder their ill-gotten proceeds. "Based on the Administration's review of the novel legal and poli...

Alleged Co-Founder of Garantex Arrested in India

Authorities in India today arrested the alleged co-founder of Garantex , a cryptocurrency exchange sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2022 for facilitating tens of billions of dollars in money laundering by transnational criminal and cybercriminal organizations. Sources close to the investigati...

Garantex Crypto Exchange Seized, Two Charged in Laundering Scheme

International law enforcement disrupts Garantex, a multi-billion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange used for money laundering. Two individuals, Aleksej Besciokov and…...

Investigators Link $1.4B Bybit Hack to North Korea’s Lazarus Group

Investigators link the $1.4B Bybit hack to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, exposing a major crypto heist tied to state-backed cybercrime and money laundering...

Canadian Charged in $65M KyberSwap, Indexed Finance DeFi Hack

Canadian man charged in $65 million DeFi hack. Exploited KyberSwap, Indexed Finance smart contracts, laundered funds, and attempted extortion. Faces 20 years...

FUNNULL Unmasked: AWS, Azure Abused for Global Cybercrime Operations

Discover how cybercriminals use 'Infrastructure Laundering' to exploit AWS and Azure for scams, phishing, and money laundering. Learn about FUNNULL CDN's tactics and their global impact on businesses and cybersecurity...

Infrastructure Laundering: Blending in with the Cloud

Image: Shutterstock, ArtHead. In an effort to blend in and make their malicious traffic tougher to block, hosting firms catering to cybercriminals in China and Russia increasingly are funneling their operations through major U.S. cloud providers. Research published this week on one such outfit --...

Illicit HuiOne Telegram Market Surpasses Hydra, Hits $24 Billion in Crypto Transactions

The Telegram-based online marketplace known as HuiOne Guarantee and its vendors have cumulatively received at least $24 billion in cryptocurrency, dwarfing the now-defunct Hydra to become the largest online illicit marketplace to have ever operated. The figures, released by blockchain analytics...

DoJ Indicts Three Russians for Operating Crypto Mixers Used in Cybercrime Laundering

The U.S. Department of Justice DoJ on Friday indicted three Russian nationals for their alleged involvement in operating the cryptocurrency mixing services Blender.io and Sinbad.io. Roman Vitalyevich Ostapenko and Alexander Evgenievich Oleynik were arrested on December 1, 2024, in coordination wi...

DoJ Indicts 14 North Koreans for $88M IT Worker Fraud Scheme Over Six Years

The U.S. Department of Justice DoJ has indicted 14 nationals belonging to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea DPRK or North Korea for their alleged involvement in a long-running conspiracy to violate sanctions and commit wire fraud, money laundering, and identity theft by illegally seeking...

How Cryptocurrency Turns to Cash in Russian Banks

A financial firm registered in Canada has emerged as the payment processor for dozens of Russian cryptocurrency exchanges and websites hawking cybercrime services aimed at Russian-speaking customers, new research finds. Meanwhile, an investigation into the Vancouver street address used by this...

Encrypted messaging service intercepted, 2.3 million messages read by law enforcement

European law enforcement agencies have taken down yet another encrypted messaging service mainly used by criminals. The Matrix encrypted messaging service was an invite-only service which was also marketed under the names Mactrix, Totalsec, X-quantum, or Q-safe. Dutch and French authorities start...