Analysis | FATF Releases Report on Combating End-to-End Illicit Financial Flows Linked to Scam…

Brief

By Dextape Desk · November 10, 2026

The Financial Action Task Force published a report on November 5, 2026, examining how scam compounds generate, move, launder and reinvest criminal proceeds. FATF calls scam compounds one of the fastest-growing forms of organized crime and estimates their losses run to tens of billions of dollars a year. A companion document lays out six principles for the response. The report says these operations are shifting from large physical sites toward decentralized, mobile networks, and it recommends that investigators look past individual premises and transactions to shared controllers, common infrastructure and key service providers. It describes a seven-stage money flow framework that is an analytical tool rather than a fixed sequence. Cash remains among the most common channels, alongside informal remittance and underground banks, while banks, e-wallets, virtual asset firms and stablecoins may also be misused.

Why it matters: It matters to crypto readers because the report places stablecoins and virtual asset firms among many channels that scam networks may exploit, not as their sole route.

Summary by Dextape, based on reporting by SlowMist. Machine-written from SlowMist’s report and checked against it · How Dextape writes