On 3 December 2025, the Court of Appeal in The Hague granted the Dutch prosecutor’s request to stop the criminal prosecution of ING’s former CEO in the so-called “Houston” money-laundering case (ECLI:NL:GHDHA:2025:2436). From now on it is clear: after almost a decade of debate around ING’s role in massive AML
When ten of Europe’s largest banks announce a joint venture to issue a new euro stablecoin, the industry celebrates it as innovation, digital sovereignty and a long-overdue counterweight to US players like Circle or Tether. This is the narrative surrounding Qivalis, the new Dutch company that aims to launch a
On 27 November 2025 the Austrian Financial Market Authority (FMA) granted KuCoin EU Exchange GmbH a licence as a crypto-asset service provider (CASP) a licence as a crypto-asset service provider (CASP) under the MiCA regime for CASPs (Title V MiCA). With this single administrative act, KuCoin obtains EU-wide passporting rights:
The Coin Center report “Tear Down this Walled Garden: American Values and Digital Identity” argues that our current AML/KYC identity system is expensive, privacy-invasive, and largely useless against real crime – and that open, decentralised digital identity built on cryptography and blockchains could do much better. Coin Center is a
On 27 November 2025, EU negotiators announced a political deal on the new Payment Services Regulation (PSR) and PSD3. The press releases promised a “historic step” against payment fraud, more protection from online scams and new liability rules for social media platforms. From the perspective of EFRI, and against the
At EFRI, we are contacted almost daily by victims of online investment scams who have been pushed into “investing” in crypto assets. The pattern is always the same: first, victims are convinced to invest in crypto – they either buy crypto on the scammers’ instructions or transfer existing crypto assets
Last week we at EFRI wrote about the Digital Omnibus leak and warned that the European Commission was preparing a stealth attack on the GDPR Since then, two things have happened: The Commission has now officially published its Digital Omnibus proposal. noyb (Max Schrems’ organisation) has released a detailed legal
In the past days, we have received multiple reports that criminals are once again abusing the name European Funds Recovery Initiative (EFRI) to run classic recovery scams. Victims have forwarded emails claiming to come from “EFRI Department” and promising that large sums are “ready for payout” once the victim pays a
The collapse of Wirecard exposed one of the worst regulatory failures in modern European financial history. For years, Germany’s financial watchdog BaFin ignored whistleblowers, dismissed detailed press investigations, attacked journalists instead of fraudsters, and even imposed a short-selling ban that stabilised the share price of what was, in fact, a
Across Europe, fraud is not only on the rise – it is also being systematically concealed. In the UK, only around 13% of fraud against individuals is reported. In Canada, authorities estimate that only 5–10% of scams ever reach the official system, while the real annual loss is believed to
