Online child sexual exploitation has become a flexible criminal ecosystem in which coercion, monetization, encrypted communications, and synthetic media reinforce one another. Offenders are using technology to scale abuse, conceal activity, and extract value from every stage of the offending cycle.

Ransomware is not defined only by file encryption and a demand for payment. The model has become more adaptive, more commercial, and more collaborative. Criminal groups have refined their tactics in response to stronger defenses, better backups, improved awareness among employees, and faster incident response. As a result, the focus has shifted in many cases from locking systems to stealing data, threatening exposure, and extracting leverage in other ways.

Online fraud has moved far beyond the image of a lone scammer sending a suspicious email. What is emerging instead is a highly structured criminal ecosystem, built around logistics, technical tools, financial channels, and division of labor. These networks operate across borders, scale quickly, and target both individuals and organizations with a level of efficiency that makes traditional fraud look small by comparison.

Cybercrime is powered by a service layer that makes crime easier to launch, harder to trace, and faster to monetize. The real threat is not just the fraud attempt itself, but the ecosystem that supports it: encrypted communications, criminal hosting, anonymization tools, laundering channels, and reusable attack infrastructure.

Financial crime systems fail in small, ordinary ways. A swapped identifier, a missing field, a fallback that looks harmless, or a timeout treated like success can turn a routine payment into a fraud loss, a compliance breach, or a customer dispute. In finance, these are control failures.

Europe is facing a cocaine wave that is changing not only public health and security, but also the financial crime environment. The picture that emerges is striking: while large seizures in major ports such as Hamburg, Antwerp, and Rotterdam have fallen, street prices have dropped sharply, and wastewater studies show rising cocaine residues in German cities. That combination points to a market that is not shrinking at all – it is adapting. For financial crime specialists, that matters because every shift in trafficking methods creates new laundering routes, new pressure points, and new opportunities for criminal networks to hide profits in the legal economy.

The 2026 Global Peace Index points to another year of worsening conditions across the world. Peace has now declined for 12 consecutive years, and the latest fall, though modest at 0.7%, hides the scale of the deterioration underneath. Out of 163 countries covered, 99 recorded a drop in peacefulness, the highest annual number since the index began 20 years ago. In total, 103 countries have deteriorated since the index was first launched, affecting almost the entire global population.

The role of the Money Laundering Reporting Officer, or MLRO, sits at the centre of an organisation’s response to financial crime. It is a position that carries serious responsibility, because the MLRO is often the person expected to assess suspicion, decide whether a report should be made, and help shape how the organisation prevents money laundering, terrorist financing and related criminal activity.

The launch of the FATF’s Roadmap 26–28 marks a clear shift in priorities. Fraud is no longer being treated as a peripheral crime that sits outside the main anti-money laundering agenda. It is now being recognized as one of the most urgent and damaging threats to financial integrity, consumer protection, and national security.

Organized crime has become more fluid, more corporate, and more financially skilled. Criminal networks use legitimate business structures, banking channels, real estate, logistics, virtual assets, and even artificial intelligence to move illicit funds and hide their activities. In many cases, they do not sit outside the economy – they operate inside it, using the same tools as lawful companies but for unlawful purposes.

The European Union’s anti-money laundering framework is moving from legislative ambition to operational reality. With the new rulebook taking shape and AMLA established in Frankfurt, the region is entering a phase that could reshape how banks, compliance teams, and other obliged entities manage financial crime risk across borders.

At the AMLA Conference session on the role of financial intelligence in tackling transnational organised crime, one message came through very clearly: financial intelligence only matters if it is used. Knowing something is not enough. The real test is whether that knowledge can disrupt crime, support investigations, protect victims, and help recover assets.

Financial crime is changing fast. What once centered on manual fraud, cash movement, and traditional laundering methods now runs through digital channels, automated tools, instant payments, and encrypted systems. The panel discussion at the 2026 AMLA Conference made one point very clear: technology is reshaping financial crime at the same pace as it is reshaping finance itself.

The creation of the EU Anti-Money Laundering Authority, AMLA, reflects a simple but important fact: the previous system was not delivering consistently enough. The conference panel made that point clearly. Financial crime does not stop at borders, and in a fragmented supervisory environment it can exploit differences between national regimes, expectations, data requests, and enforcement styles.

Sanctions against Russia are not designed to create an instant collapse. Their effect is slower, more cumulative, and often less visible at first glance. This is why the analogy of a punctured tyre is so useful. A blowout is immediate and dramatic. A puncture is different. The air leaks out gradually until the vehicle can no longer keep moving. That is a better description of how sanctions work against a war economy built on evasion, coercion, and state pressure.

The global conversation on corruption is shifting from disclosure and domestic enforcement to institutional solutions that cross borders. At the 15th Good Governance Academy colloquium, expert drafters, judges, prosecutors, asset recovery specialists and business leaders set out a reasoned, pragmatic case for an International Anti‑Corruption Court (IACC) – a treaty‑based tribunal intended to investigate and prosecute grand corruption and to facilitate the decisive recovery and return of looted public assets. The draft statute and the project behind it are not an ideological flourish; they respond to practical governance failures that today allow kleptocrats to hide behind weak domestic systems and stash stolen wealth in jurisdictions that are difficult to penetrate.

The Report to the Nations® began in 1996 as a practical response to a glaring information gap. Joe Wells, founder of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), recognized from his FBI and consulting experience that occupational fraud was widespread yet poorly documented. He also realized the ACFE itself held a rich but distributed reservoir of practitioner knowledge. The solution was simple and ambitious – aggregate real case data collected by certified fraud examiners (CFEs) and analyze it to reveal how fraud is committed, detected, and addressed. What started as stacks of paper surveys mailed to members grew, over three decades, into a global, data‑driven resource that influences how organizations think about fraud risk.

What FATF is and how it shapes global AML/CFT policy

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is an intergovernmental body that sets global standards for anti–money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT). Born out of a 1989 G7 initiative focused on drug-related money flows, FATF’s remit has grown over decades. After 2001 it explicitly included terrorist financing, and more recently it has an open-ended mandate allowing its scope to expand further. FATF’s work is expressed through its Recommendations – the standards that countries are expected to implement – and through a process of mutual evaluations that test both the technical legal framework a country has in place and how effective that framework is in practice. FATF itself has no direct punitive powers; its influence rests on the political and economic weight of its members and the reputational and financial consequences it can trigger for jurisdictions deemed deficient.

The birth and growth of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office – EPPO – represent a major institutional innovation in the EU’s fight against financial crime. In a wide‑ranging interview recorded on 9 March 2026, European Chief Prosecutor Laura Codruța Kövesi set out how the EPPO came into being, how it works in practice, the practical and legal challenges it faces, and why its focus on VAT and customs fraud is central to tackling organised crime across Europe.

Understanding corruption as a networked, adaptive phenomenon forces us to rethink prevention and enforcement. Recent research presented at the Basel Institute on Governance webinar reframes corruption not as isolated acts by “bad apples” but as complex adaptive systems of people, professional enablers and institutions that evolve in response to changing context and controls. This perspective has immediate implications for how investigators, regulators and policymakers design interventions, anticipate unintended consequences and preserve the rule of law while being more effective.

The European Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) has initiated a large-scale data collection from a sample of roughly 5,000 credit and financial institutions across the EU. The primary aim is methodological: to test, refine and calibrate a harmonized money laundering and terrorist financing (ML/TF) risk assessment and selection methodology that can be applied consistently across sectors and jurisdictions. This exercise is not intended to produce supervisory conclusions about individual institutions. Instead, submitted data will feed into the development and calibration of two methodological strands – the selection model and the rescoring model – to ensure the future EU-level framework is operational, comparable, and proportionate.

Opening the conversation on virtual assets at the first-ever tech day of the Conference of the States Parties (CoSP) highlighted a global consensus: digital finance promises efficiency, inclusion, and transparency, but it also introduces new, fast-moving risks that demand coordinated, adaptive regulation. Speakers from international organizations, regional regulators, national authorities and the private sector converged to stress three enduring priorities: harmonized standards, cross-border cooperation and pragmatic, risk-based rules that preserve innovation while protecting financial integrity.

The Basel AML Index 2025 refines how we see and use jurisdictional risk for money laundering and related financial crimes. The Basel Institute on Governance continues to treat measurement as the essential first step to change: clear definitions and rigorous indicators expose drivers of risk, provide diagnostics for policy and operational responses, and create benchmarks that let governments and firms track progress.

The webinar co-hosted by the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) laid out a practical, hard-won roadmap for countries that have successfully exited the FATF International Cooperation Review Group (ICRG) – the so-called grey list.Together with FATF leadership and AfDB officials, speakers from Nigeria, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Mauritius and Jamaica turned a technical compliance discussion into a vivid account of political choices, institutional changes and social consequences.Their accounts show that, provided reforms are sustained and institutionalised, greylisting can be a powerful catalyst rather than a punishment.

Grand corruption and illicit financial flows are two sides of the same coin: corrupt actors create opportunities to divert large public resources, and those diverted funds then travel through complex financial networks to hide origin and ownership. Recent preliminary research from the Falcon project analyzed 42 corruption cases spanning the 1990s to 2024 to identify recurring patterns in the financial side of grand corruption. The study seeks a unified financial perspective that treats the corrupt acts and the subsequent money movement as a single, integrated process, enabling better detection, research and enforcement.

Money laundering and what scholars call “money dirtying” are closely related but distinct phenomena. Both manipulate financial flows to obscure origin and destination, and both rely on professional enablers, offshore vehicles and cross-border financial infrastructure. Yet they differ at a fundamental level: money laundering takes proceeds that are already illicit and seeks to reintroduce them into the legitimate economy; money dirtying converts legitimately obtained funds into illegitimate ones, typically to finance corruption, terrorist activity or other illicit ends. Examining the Odebrecht scandal shows how those two processes can be complementary parts of a single, sophisticated criminal architecture.

The 2025 Global Organized Crime Index shows a worrying, sustained rise in organized criminality across the five Mekong countries, with criminality increasing while resilience falls. Between 2021 and 2024 the Index recorded a continuous year‑on‑year rise in criminality across the Mekong, a 0.57‑point increase overall; certain markets — synthetics, human trafficking (including online child sexual exploitation) and financial crime — now exert severe influence across the region.

From the sweeping deserts and hills of northwest Nigeria come stories that put a human face on a global market problem: escalating gold prices and increasing demand have helped fuel a shadow economy that finances armed groups, corrodes local governance and devastates communities. Investigations by Nigerian reporters working with the Global Initiative’s observatory and resilience fellowship show how artisanal mining sites in Kaduna and Zamfara states have become contested economic zones where bandit groups extract rents, force labor, traffic gold across porous borders and trade that gold for guns and ammunition.

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime’s 2025 Global Organized Crime Index (OC Index) offers the first five‑year view of criminality and state resilience across all 193 UN member states. Building on three editions (2021, 2023, 2025), extensive expert input and thousands of data points, the index demonstrates a worrying trajectory: criminality continues to rise while resilience — the capacity of states and societies to prevent, withstand and recover from organized criminal threats — is faltering. The 2025 edition is notable not only for what it measures (15 criminal markets, five actor types, 12 resilience pillars) but for what the trends reveal: a reorganizing global illicit economy that increasingly exploits technological change, economic pressure and institutional weakness.

Financial crime in the crypto ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly. At a recent global conference bringing together law enforcement, regulators, private-sector innovators, asset managers and educators, practitioners stressed that the problem is not a single technology or typology but a moving target of techniques, jurisdictions and professional enablers. Criminals exploit privacy coins, bridges, decentralized finance and jurisdictional gaps, while using both digital and traditional means to launder proceeds. The panelists concurred that responding effectively requires continuous innovation in investigative tools, sustained capacity building, reorganization to enable collaboration, multisector partnerships and attention to the full lifecycle from prevention to asset management and forfeiture.

Financial crime teams rarely struggle because they lack data. They struggle because the data arrives fragmented, inconsistent, and hard to connect across systems. Transaction records sit in one place, customer information in another, adverse media in a third, and suspicious activity reports (SARs) somewhere else again. The real challenge is turning that mass of information into something that helps identify money laundering patterns, expose the predicate offense behind them, and separate signal from noise.

The growth of online gaming has created a complex digital economy where virtual goods, in-game currencies and large, social gaming communities intersect with real-world money and communications tools. In a RUSI webinar based on a new report by Gonzalo Saiz, Jessica Davis, PhD, et al., the conversation focused on whether and how that digital ecosystem can be abused to raise, move or launder funds linked to terrorism and violent extremism. The discussion highlighted current knowledge gaps, practical investigative challenges, and the need for targeted research and policy responses.

Setting the scene: research to action

Corruption often hides in routine administrative choices and everyday transactions, making early detection difficult. The FALCON project, funded by the EU’s Horizon programme, collected multidisciplinary evidence over three years and translated it into practical, data-driven red flags andrisk indicators to support law enforcement and policymakers. By combining social science research, advanced analytics and collaboration with end users, the project created tools to better detect corruption risk in three high‑risk domains: public procurement, sanctions circumvention and border management.

Why this conversation matters

The Centre for Finance and Security at RUSI hosted a vital discussion with Elisa de Anda Madrazo, President of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), about women’s roles in preventing financial crime. FATF’s 2023 “Women in FATF and the Global Network” initiative marked a milestone: it made gender equality an explicit priority in the anti-money laundering and countering terrorist financing community. The initiative and the event aimed to ensure that talent and perspective are fully harnessed to protect the global financial system — and to ask how women’s leadership can motivate and prepare the next generation of leaders.

Ruth Dearnley of Stop the Traffik and John Cusack of the Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime reviewed how financial institutions can move from compliance exercises to measurable impact in tackling human trafficking. Their discussion traced the sector’s journey from limited awareness to operational intelligence partnerships, and set out what’s still needed to scale effective disruption.

Introduction: what the 2024 launch revealed

The Basel AML Index 2024 public edition maps country-level risks for money laundering and related financial crimes, combining vulnerability and counter‑measure capacity across five domains and 17 indicators. The Index expanded coverage to 164 jurisdictions and introduced fraud data as a new input, reflecting the urgent need to capture the growing social and economic harm from fraud and its strong link to money laundering. Presenters and panellists used the launch to unpack methodology changes, regional patterns, gaps in effectiveness, lessons from grey‑listing and the practical value of country risk assessments for financial institutions.

Tom Keatinge’s conversation with Dr Marcus Pleyer traces a career that transformed Germany’s anti‑money‑laundering (AML) capacity and placed him at the center of global policy debates as FATF president. The discussion covers Pleyer’s early decisions to prioritise AML, the agenda he pursued at FATF, the role of technology and AI, unintended consequences of AML measures, proliferation financing, the upcoming fifth evaluation cycle, and the European Union’s new Anti‑Money‑Laundering Authority (AMLA). It also outlines Germany’s internal reforms, including plans for a federal financial‑crime agency and why financial crime must be treated as a national security issue.

A panel at the 8th Global Conference on Criminal Finances and Cryptocurrencies examined how crypto assets are being used by organised criminal groups to facilitate human trafficking, migrant smuggling and drug trafficking. The discussion explored investigative challenges and opportunities, whether responses are keeping pace, and how jurisdictions can improve cooperation and capacity.

At the 8th Global Conference on Criminal Finances and Cryptocurrencies, a high‑level panel explored how banks and other regulated financial institutions can prevent and detect money laundering involving crypto assets without stifling innovation. Participants included representatives from the Wolfsberg Group, the European Central Bank, the European Banking Authority, Europol, UNODC, et alii. The discussion covered regulatory progress in the EU, payment transparency and the travel rule, practical exposure scenarios for banks, the role of technology and analytics, challenges around source of wealth, and operational steps institutions can take now.