Britain to recruit 500 officers to trace and seize criminal money

Britain will recruit 500 officers to trace and seize criminal money, backed by £500 million over three years, the Home Office said on Tuesday.

The money funds a new Anti-Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Strategy and comes from the economic crime levy on regulated firms. Officers will be spread across police forces, the National Crime Agency and the Crown Prosecution Service.

The NCA reckons more than £100 billion is laundered through the UK or British corporate structures each year, and the threat "has grown in recent years from the rise of fintech, crypto and AI," the Home Office said.

The officers will build on Operation Destabilise, the investigation into Russian-speaking networks that convert street cash into crypto for organised crime groups, the Home Office said. The NCA plans a fresh campaign of arrests and cash seizures against networks it says enable ransomware groups, hostile states and the class A drugs trade. It puts the operation's tally so far at 119 suspected launderers arrested and more than £25 million seized in cash and crypto in under a year.

A growing priority

The NCA asked for this in public last week. Its economic crime centre said in its annual report that criminals were making "innovative use of crypto asset products to evade detection and move illicit value at scale," and that it wanted to expand the Destabilise model to other networks while building "a more proactive and intelligence-led crypto capability." Cryptoassets rank third on the nine economic crime priorities it agreed with the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority.

Sal Melki, the NCA's deputy director for economic crime, said that fighting financial crime "has become more complex as criminals embrace new technologies," and that the investment would fund an “innovative financial intelligence service for the UK" and more capacity to target criminals’ financial architecture.

The government put its returns for the past year at almost £350 million stripped from criminals, more than £1 billion denied, £26 million returned to victims and almost 4,000 money laundering convictions.