Investigators found drug traffickers, Southeast Asian scam gangs, and North Korean hackers frequently using major crypto platforms to quietly move their funds.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) Coin Laundry investigation found illicit funds were funneled through major cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, OKX, Coinbase, Kraken, Bybit, and Kucoin, as part of a global shadow economy benefiting from criminal proceeds.
The 10-month cross-border project, which was conducted with 37 media partners in 35 countries, gathered hundreds of wallet addresses connected to scams, theft, sanctions violations, and other illicit activity, and traced tens of thousands of transactions across public blockchains.
Criminal Cash Across World’s Biggest Exchanges
The investigation found that money launderers working for drug traffickers, Southeast Asian scam networks, and North Korean hacking groups routinely used leading exchanges to move their funds.
An important finding revealed that Huione Group, a Cambodian financial institution designated by US authorities as a “primary money laundering concern,” sent around $1 million worth of USDT per day to accounts at Binance as recently as July 2025. This contributed to more than $408 million in total transfers from July 2024 to July 2025.
These flows continued even while Binance operated under two court-appointed monitors as part of its November 2023 plea deal for violating US anti-money laundering laws, which required the company to pay $4.3 billion. The investigation also found that more than $226 million entered customer accounts at OKX from Huione in the five months after OKX pleaded guilty in the US in February 2025 to operating an unlicensed money transmitter and agreed to pay over $504 million in penalties.
According to ICIJ, these transfers persisted despite Huione’s designation in May as a major laundering concern. Reporters also examined how so-called cash desks and courier services operating in cities such as Hong Kong, Toronto, London, and Istanbul allow users to anonymously cash out large sums of cryptocurrency outside regulatory oversight, forming another channel through which illicit proceeds reach or exit exchanges.
The report additionally documented how scam victims across 12 countries saw their stolen funds move through these same major platforms. To highlight the scale of criminal activity using crypto infrastructure, the investigation detailed the alleged pyramid and Ponzi scheme led by Vladimir Okhotnikov, who was accused of stealing at least $340 million from investors between 2020 and 2022 via a manipulated cryptocurrency investment platform and continuing to run similar schemes from Dubai.
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Anonymous Wallets and “Swappers”
While blockchain records provide transparency, ICIJ reported that criminals use anonymous wallets and tools such as “swappers” to complicate tracing, creating major tracing challenges for exchange compliance teams. More than a dozen former compliance workers at companies including Binance and OKX told ICIJ they struggled to keep up with increasingly sophisticated laundering techniques.
Regulators globally have imposed at least $5.8 billion in fines and penalties on crypto exchanges, but oversight remains fragmented, even as US authorities estimate $9.3 billion in crypto-related losses in 2024.
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