Crypto’s €700 Million Crime Machine Exposes Global Enforcement Failure -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

This isn’t just another dramatic Europol claptrap of a crypto freud and money laundering network that processed more than €700 million to be ticked off the EU desk. This should be seen as an indictment of a worldwide financial system that had permitted this industrial-type criminal enterprise to operate across jurisdictions, blockchains, exchanges and social-media ecosystems before the authorities moved in.

A transnational scammer network run by a fully fledged system of fraudulent crypto investment platforms and ancillary services such as call centres, marketing affiliates and an elaborate laundering pipeline to cash out. Europol states thousands of victims were victimised and investigators from France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Cyprus, Malta, Bulgaria and Israel took part in the various phases of the probe.

This was long before primitive internet fraud. This is from convincing fake trading platforms that were built by the network, hiring promoters through cleverly crafted ads and then social engineering victims into continuing making payments with call-center operatives’ help. Fake dashboards displayed inflated returns. The profits fictitious; the deposits real. After the cryptocurrency was transferred, it was stolen by criminals and washed through exchanges and several blockchains.

A series of co-ordinated raids that saw nine people arrested in Cyprus, Germany and Spain took place on October 27, 2025. Then, a phase two at an action day on November 25 and 26 took aim at the affiliate-marketing machinery underpinning fake ads, with operations in Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany and Israel. Officers also confiscated €800,000 in bank accounts, more than €415,000 of crypto-currency, as well as €300,000 in cash and luxury watches and digital devices.

Because the criminals globalised faster than law enforcement. Criminals were able to harness the jurisdictional fragmentation that sits between police, prosecutors, financial-intelligence units, cryptocurrency exchanges and advertising platforms and telecommunications providers. Money moves across a blockchain in seconds; requests for evidence, in weeks or months.

The true scandal is that asymmetry.

But the network also realized something that regulators still don’t: fraud in the modern financial world is, at its core, a psychological phenomenon. Hackers did not just hack We Are Giants. They hacked trust. The perpetrators brought victims with the social-media advertising; the celebrity endorsements made them feel real; a site that looked like a professional marketing platform built trust; and the call center created urgency.

It was a supply chain of international organized fraud.

The 700 million euro figure should also annihilate another comfortable delusion: crypto-crime is no longer a sideshow in the world of technology. Organized financial crime on an institutional level. And Europol details money laundering of over 700 million euros (more than $740) through multiple exchanges and blockchains.

There is also a paradox of enforcement that is dangerous as well. Arrests of operatives without dismantling the ecosystem that supports them merely creates space for the next cartel.

That means that governments need a completely different strategy.

First, Europol, Eurojust and national financial-intelligence units also need to establish permanent real-time joint crypto financial intelligence cells instead of relying on occasional cooperation.

Second, require cryptocurrency exchanges to comply with rapid-freeze protocols whenever verified indicators of fraud materialize, along with strengthened beneficial-ownership and transaction tracing mandates.

Third, assuming it is possible to compile these in a way that can be retrospectively verified whilst maintaining privacy and confidentiality of ongoing police investigation, social-media and digital-advertising companies should incur an enforceable liability for acting as repeated enablers through financial remuneration of fraudulent investment advertisements, deepfake endorsements or criminal affiliate networks when providedwith credible warnings.

Fourth, prosecutors should take aim at the entire criminal system: brokers, call-center managers, money launderers, affiliate marketers, shell companies and even technical administrators and financial facilitators—not just those who sit at a desk talking on telephones.

Finally asset recovery must be put on an equal footing with imprisonment. Criminal networks calculate risk economically. Taking away the infrastructure and profits which make scams lucrative will eventually have more impact than any additional headline – grabbing arrest or charge.

An international operation that shows governments can work together across the borders.

Yet €700 million spurs a much less pleasant question:

Why did it take the world so long to lose so much money before its law-enforcement systems finally learned to cooperate at the same speed as the criminals?

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Managing Partner Law Firm Victorious Indonesia