The UK government is to invest more than £500 million in a new crackdown on money laundering and illicit finance, including the recruitment of 500 additional financial crime officers.
The investment, spread over three years and funded through the economic crime levy, forms part of the government’s new Anti-Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Strategy. The additional investigators will be deployed across police forces, the National Crime Agency (NCA) and Crown Prosecution Service.
For fraud prevention leaders, the strategy comes as the boundaries between fraud, money laundering and other forms of financial crime become increasingly interconnected. The NCA estimates that more than £100 billion is laundered through the UK or UK corporate structures annually, with illicit networks used to move proceeds from activities including fraud, drug trafficking and corruption. The government also identifies fintech, cryptocurrency and AI as technologies contributing to the evolving threat.
The strategy will invest in new intelligence capabilities and technology while seeking stronger collaboration between government, law enforcement and the private sector. The NCA says this will include developing a new financial intelligence service and deepening public-private partnerships.
The announcement follows a year in which almost £350 million in criminal proceeds was recovered and more than £1 billion denied to criminals. Some 2,700 illicit finance operations were disrupted, while money laundering convictions increased to almost 4,000.
The Financial Conduct Authority has also backed the strategy. Steve Smart, its executive director of enforcement and market oversight, said reforms to anti-money laundering supervision represented an opportunity to create more consistent oversight of professional services and improve the identification and disruption of financial crime.
For businesses combating merchant fraud, the strategy reinforces the growing importance of intelligence sharing and joined-up approaches to detecting suspicious transactions and financial networks, particularly as criminals adopt new technologies and increasingly operate across borders.
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