The Financial Crime Epidemic AS Illicit Financial Activity Surges 19.2% over two years, to $4.4 Trillion in 2025

Nasdaq Verafin Report Finds the Financial Crime Epidemic Reaching Alarming New Heights as Illicit Financial Activity Surges to $4.4 Trillion in 2025

NEW YORK, March 11, 2026 – Nasdaq Verafin has released its 2026 Global Financial Crime Report, the second edition of a comprehensive research initiative that provides insights into the scope and scale of financial crime worldwide. Combining proprietary data modelling, a survey of more than 500 financial crime professionals, and in-depth interviews with senior executives, this report provides the company’s most rigorous analysis of industry threats, priorities, and opportunities to date.

The 2026 Global Financial Crime Report found that illicit financial activity has surged by $1.3 trillion since 2023, bringing the global financial crime epidemic to an estimated $4.4 trillion.

• https://verafin.com/nasdaq-verafin-global-financial-crime-report/

With a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.2% over two years, this growth in the scope, scale, and evolution of financial crime fundamentally threatens the integrity of the financial system, powering insidious and destabilising crimes such as human trafficking and terrorism.

As trillions of dollars in illicit funds flowed through the financial system, there was significant growth across every measured typology, with illicit flows reaching:

• $1.1 trillion in drug trafficking activity, with annualised growth of 17.1% 
• $528.5 billion in human trafficking, with annualised growth of 23.5% 
• $16.2 billion in terrorist financing, with annualised growth of 18.8% 

In addition, fraud and bank fraud schemes led to $579.4 billion in global losses.

• Notably, losses from fraud scams are growing more than twice the rate of bank fraud, reaching $62 billion and growing at a compound annual growth rate of 19.3% over the last two years.
• Powering this dramatic rise in scam losses is the widespread use of AI by criminal networks, who leverage advances in technology to exploit vulnerabilities in the financial system.
• The speed at which this new threat has saturated the market is alarming – 90% of financial crime professionals surveyed in this report reported an increase in AI-driven attacks at their institutions over the past two years. 

Stephanie Champion, Executive Vice President and Head of Nasdaq Verafin.

• “We are currently in the midst of a full-blown financial crime crisis, powered by criminal networks that are leveraging AI to super-charge scam playbooks and operating with the scale and coordination of multinational corporations,”
• “While AI has emerged as a key tool for criminals, the industry recognises the potential of the technology to become its most valuable asset in the fight against financial crime. Cutting-edge technology, combined with improved public-private and private-private collaboration, creates a network effect, magnifying the reach of our collective efforts and helping remove criminals from the financial system for good.” 

Financial institutions are on the front lines of the fight against financial crime, but they cannot defeat criminal threats alone.

• The scale and complexity of today’s crisis require collective action across every sector impacted by the financial crime ecosystem. Embedded throughout the 2026 Global Financial Crime Report are spotlights on organisations demonstrating coordinated action in the fight against financial crime. The organisations highlighted in this report offer a blueprint for what successful collaboration looks like between the public and private sectors, as well as between financial institutions and across industries. 

The 2026 Global Financial Crime Report was produced by Nasdaq Verafin in collaboration with Celent and Oliver Wyman, leveraging a custom data model developed from public and private sources to calculate the scale of global crime.  

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To read the full report and learn more about Nasdaq Verafin’s pledge to fight financial crime, please visit: https://verafin.com/nasdaq-verafin-global-financial-crime-report.  

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