TrustSphere
 

The sanctions designation of Tornado Cash was supposed to be a turning point in the fight against on-chain money laundering. In practice, it accelerated the diversification of obfuscation techniques rather than eliminating them. The mixer ecosystem of 2026 looks materially different from that of 2022, and compliance teams need an updated mental model. Criminals have adapted in four directions: decentralised alternatives, cross-chain bridges, privacy-preserving layer-2 protoco

The collapse of NFT trading volumes from their 2021 peak has produced the mistaken impression that NFTs are no longer a material AML concern. In reality, the typology has matured, diversified into gaming platforms and in-app economies, and continues to attract criminal proceeds at meaningful scale. Regulatory frameworks in most jurisdictions lag the sophistication of these laundering techniques. For compliance teams at financial institutions, platforms and regulators, the gap

The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act has now been in force long enough to assess its real-world impact. The reforms to Companies House, the failure-to-prevent fraud offence, and the expanded identity verification requirements represented the UK's most ambitious anti-economic-crime reform package in decades. Two years on, the picture is mixed. Transparency has improved in measurable ways. Enforcement capacity has expanded. But structural weaknesses in verification

In an era dominated by real-time payments, instant P2P apps and cross-border stablecoins, check fraud should by rights be a dying typology. Instead, US banks reported more than two million check fraud cases in 2025 and losses have continued to climb. Across parts of Europe and Asia, check-equivalent instruments have seen similar criminal resurgence. The paradox is that the same digital modernisation that was supposed to kill the check has in fact given criminals easier access

Business Email Compromise has persisted as the most financially damaging category of cyber-enabled fraud for most of the past decade, and 2026 has provided no reason to expect that pattern will change. Losses reported to law enforcement worldwide are approaching USD 60 billion cumulatively, with individual events routinely exceeding seven figures. What has changed is the operational sophistication of the attackers. Generative AI, voice cloning and adversary-in-the-middle phis

Despite sophisticated policies and stringent regulatory frameworks, many systems designed to manage Non-Financial Risks (NFR),...