US and EU Asset Recovery is Failing Fraud Victims Authorities routinely celebrate their successes in tracing, freezing and confiscating criminal assets. Yet the crucial final step — returning those assets to the victims — remains fragmented, discretionary and painfully slow. Current cryptocurrency forfeiture proceedings in the United States expose the
Days before the MiCA transition ended, Malta authorised an OpenPayd company to provide crypto services across Europe. The controlling owner and the warning signs were public. The MFSA’s assessment was not.
$68 Billion Lost to US Scams — Europe Lacks the Loss Estimate A landmark new study puts a hard number on a problem victims have long felt in their bank accounts and their mental health. According to the new study “United States of Scams: The Financial and Emotional Fallout”, published
The uncomfortable question is no longer whether banks had AML policies. The question is whether their published claims of group-wide control were ever tested against operational reality. A new EU standard exposes an old credibility problem Large European banking groups have told investors, regulators and the public for years that
In the United States, online fraud linked to Southeast Asian scam compounds has moved from a niche cybercrime issue to a major law-enforcement, sanctions and national-security concern. The U.S. Department of Justice has created a Scam Center Strike Force targeting cryptocurrency investment fraud, cyber-enabled fraud, human trafficking and money-laundering operations
Online investment scams rarely begin with one large bank transfer. They usually start much earlier: with an online advertisement, a registration form, a small first deposit, a fake trading account, a dashboard showing apparent profits, repeated calls from an “account manager”, and a withdrawal process that becomes increasingly difficult. For
ESMA: Unauthorised CASPs Must Wind Down On 23 June 2026, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) issued a clear warning to crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) that have not obtained authorisation under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). After the end of the MiCA transitional period on 1 July 2026,
Meta, TikTok and Google are facing consumer complaints in Europe over financial scam advertisements. But the key question goes beyond platform compliance: if regulators impose fines, why should the money disappear into public budgets while the victims remain uncompensated? On 21 May 2026, BEUC, the European Consumer Organisation, together with
Enhanced transaction monitoring under the PSR is old wine in new bottles. The bottle is better. The protection for victims is still not good enough
For years, high-risk merchants, offshore gambling operators and unlicensed online investment platforms have used a simple workaround to access European payment rails: insert an EU-based company into the payment chain and call it a “payment agent”, “payment processing agent” or “collection agent.” The model became popular for obvious reasons.
