Funnel accounts: how banks spot them
A funnel account takes cash deposits in one region and pays it out in another. How the pattern arose, the FinCEN red flags, and how banks detect it.
Blog
New enforcement actions and rule changes, connected back to the techniques and cases they involve. Also available by RSS.
Guarantee marketplaces: laundering for hire
Huione and Xinbi worked like escrow platforms for criminals. How guarantee marketplaces work, why regulators target them, and what investigators look for.
How Investigators Follow Stolen Crypto
How investigators traced the Bybit theft across chains: bridge logs, address clustering, freezes and seizures, and why chain hopping still outruns them.
How money laundering actually gets detected
Detecting money laundering in practice: five real cases, from a Speaker's cash withdrawals to a hacker's bitcoin, and the route that caught each one.
Three Iran choke points
Treasury's Iran campaign hit a Russian bank, a crypto exchange and an oil-proceeds network in one month. What each action shows about sanctions evasion.
Smart contract mixers: hard to police?
A smart contract mixer has no operator to subpoena. How it differs from custodial mixers, what courts and regulators did, and what investigators still see.
How the Bybit hack was laundered so fast
North Korea's Lazarus Group stole about $1.5 billion from Bybit in February 2025 and laundered it in roughly ten days. Here's the pipeline, step by step.
What TD Bank's guilty plea changed
TD Bank became the first US bank to plead guilty to money laundering conspiracy, paying about US$3.09 billion. What the plea changed, and what it didn't.
Why they call it the Vancouver Model
Drug cash, underground banks, and casino chips: how a BC-specific laundering pattern earned its own name, and what the Cullen Commission found broken.