By 2025, cryptocurrencies have migrated from niche payments experiments to core infrastructure for organized crime in Latin America. What began as opportunistic use—isolated conversions of cash to BTC or USDT—has hardened into systematic adoption: coordinated, large-value transfers, staged laundering through corporate façades, and integration with cybercrime to convert digital theft into untraceable value.

The operational picture has two integrated fronts. First, high-end cyberattacks are being executed as value-extraction plays. A striking example occurred in July 2025 when a coordinated cyberattack against a Brazilian financial institution resulted in roughly $150 million being siphoned and moved into crypto rails. Parallel activity has included credential-stealing malware families—operators like Grandoreiro are still active—designed to harvest corporate and retail banking logins at scale, enabling direct access to fiat corridors that are then bridged into on-chain assets.

Second, traditional criminal markets—drug trafficking, arms sales, extortion—have built crypto-native laundering pipelines. These pipelines combine shell companies, layered on-chain trades, and “blending” techniques that use dozens of intermediary wallets, cross-chain bridges, and decentralized exchanges to fragment provenance. Launderers increasingly prefer assets and services that add two properties: rapid on/off ramps and plausible deniability through a chain of corporate intermediaries. Authorities in Brazil recorded more than $190 million laundered through cryptocurrency channels in a single recent year, underlining how quickly volume has scaled.

Mechanically, the laundering playbook has matured. Initial placement frequently uses local OTC desks and peer-to-peer markets to avoid exchange KYC; layering leverages cross-chain swaps, privacy coin tunnels, and temporary private wallets; integration into the legitimate economy often exploits nominee companies, falsified invoices, and complicit financial professionals to reintroduce value as “clean” revenue. Where centralized exchanges remain a choke point, criminals favor fragmentation—spreading funds across many smaller exchange accounts or routing through exchanges in jurisdictions with lax supervision.

Regulatory responses are proliferating but uneven. Brazil and Chile, among others, have moved to tighten KYC and reporting obligations on onramps and OTC trading. New rules target corporate intermediaries and require stricter customer due diligence for high-risk counterparty flows. Enforcement, however, is hampered by technology and jurisdictional mismatches: smart contracts and decentralized platforms operate without a legal personality to sanction; cross-border crypto flows can complete in minutes; and bad actors continually swap tools and chains faster than regulatory cycles can adapt. The result is a persistent enforcement lag: rules are strengthening, but detection and interdiction remain reactive.

For law enforcement, the resource and technology imbalance is acute. Criminal networks have adopted an R&D mindset—testing new mixers, experimenting with cross-chain liquidity pools, and integrating cybertheft with immediate on-chain conversion—to minimize windows for seizure. Investigative toolkits have improved—blockchain analytics, subpoenas to centralized exchange operators, and cooperation frameworks—but these tools are constrained by false positives, privacy-preserving primitives, and the sheer throughput of transaction volumes. The net effect is that organized groups operate with a growing degree of operational security and transactional opacity.

Market mechanics also make criminal adoption efficient. Stablecoins and tokenized assets provide predictable rails for value transfer and short settlement times; decentralized finance primitives allow instant conversion and fragmentation; and OTC liquidity providers in local currency create low-friction exits. This efficiency reduces the transaction costs and friction that once limited the size of crypto-enabled criminal operations, enabling larger single-event thefts and faster laundering cycles.

The region’s criminal ecosystems are therefore in the midst of a crypto arms race: groups that once treated crypto as an experimental adjunct now allocate personnel, invest in tooling, and run persistent laundering infrastructures. Law enforcement is catching up in pieces—national regulations, targeted takedowns, and international cooperation are yielding arrests and some asset recoveries—but structural challenges remain in attribution, cross-border enforcement, and technology governance. Reporting compiled by Insight Crime summarizes these trends and provides case context: https://insightcrime.org/news/gamechangers-2025-cryptocurrency-now-criminal-mainstream/