According to the recent report by intelligence firm TRM Labs, the crypto illicit transaction volume experienced unprecedented nominal growth during the year 2025, reaching the figure of 158 billion dollars. Despite this massive increase in value terms, the proportion of criminal activity fell to 1.2% of the total on-chain volume throughout the entire digital ecosystem.
This statistical phenomenon, reported by analyst Hassan Shittu, demonstrates that while digital crime grows in gross figures, the legitimate ecosystem expands more rapidly, thus diluting the percentage impact of malicious actors. However, the jump from the 64.5 billion registered in 2024 represents a 145% increase, driven mainly by sanctions evasion networks across various jurisdictions.
The infrastructure of sanctioned states, especially through the use of the ruble-linked stablecoin A7A5, has dominated the landscape of fund movements, leaving traditional retail scammers far behind in terms of volume. Therefore, the report highlights that criminal activity has become more institutionalized and dependent on parallel financial networks to bypass international controls and oversight mechanisms.
The evolution toward complex financial infrastructures and the use of stablecoins to evade global sanctions
Within this dynamic, the use of the A7A5 stablecoin mobilized more than 72 billion dollars, facilitating complex operations within the Russian evasion system, which underscores a transformation in the use of blockchain technology. Likewise, wallets linked to the A7 system managed at least 39 billion dollars, evidencing high-level state coordination that utilizes digital assets to maintain its global financial liquidity.
Furthermore, the report introduces an innovative metric that measures delinquency relative to deployable capital, revealing that illicit actors captured only 2.7% of liquidity, an improvement compared to 2.9% in the previous period. In this way, it is confirmed that although the gross volume is startling, criminals absorb less and less new capital, while the market shifts toward less regulated channels to survive.
How did massive hacks and artificial intelligence influence financial fraud in 2025?
In the field of cyberattacks, losses amounted to 2.87 billion dollars distributed across 150 incidents, with the Bybit hack being the most devastating blow, which represented more than half of the total annual losses recorded. Additionally, attackers have stopped focusing on smart contracts to direct their efforts toward operational infrastructure, managing to seize 70% of the total loot with only five major attacks.
At the same time, scams remained persistent with 35 billion dollars in losses, where pig butchering schemes and Ponzi operations were enhanced through the use of generative artificial intelligence, accelerating the reach of deceptions. Consequently, analysts predict that technology will continue to be a double-edged sword, as criminal networks optimize their laundering methods to move funds in record time.
