🇪🇺🇳🇱 DUTCH COURT OF AUDITS FINDS "NO UNDERSTANDING" OF EFFECTIVENESS FOR AML APPROACH The Dutch Court of Audits has published a paper on Anti-Money Laundering (AML) in banking, finding that "there is no understanding of the effectiveness of the anti-money laundering approach." The paper states that "it is not clear whether the increasing controls by banks actually contribute to the prevention and detection of money laundering," while highlighting the significant costs imposed on banks. According to the court, AML measures are discriminatory particularly towards people with foreign surnames, stating that the lack of proven effectiveness of the measures "does not establish that this distinction is justified." The court plans to put its research into EU perspective later this year.

🚨 GERMAN BANKS SEIZE ACCOUNTS OF JOURNALISTS WIFE The bank accounts of German journalist Hüseyin Dogru's wife have been seized, putting his family at risk of homelessness. Dogru was sanctioned by the EU for reporting on Palestinian resistance movements in 2024. His wife's accounts have now been seized under the argument that Dogru may be able to control the accounts. Last week, German courts denied an easing of restrictions on Dogru's bank accounts after he appealed to authorities to fulfill his basic needs.

🇺🇸 Numerous accounts are amplifying talks from the Digital Chamber's DC Blockchain Summit, in which Congresspeople promise to get the CLARITY Act across the line between end of the week and end of the year. While largely sold as a positive to the industry, the latest market structure draft has proven to tow a dangerous line that could enable increased surveillance and the effective criminalization of privacy. With stablecoin yield as the number one point of discussion, the cryptocurrency industry will likely have to make concessions in its protections of DeFi for CLARITY to have a chance of passing the Democrats, who continue to view illicit finance a red line. Several stand-alone bills have since been introduced in Congress to protect developers, such as the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act and the Promoting Innovation in Blockchain Development Act, which offer safer pathways to safeguard development.

🇺🇸“We’re not the securities and everything commission anymore” The SEC has issued an interpretation that clarifies the application of federal securities laws to digital assets using definitions in the GENIUS Act. The document clarifies bitcoin and other digital assets as a commodity. Going forward, only securities that have been tokenized will fall under the SEC's authority, says SEC Chair Paul Atkins. The interpretation ends a long dispute over the SEC's jurisdiction over digital assets which potentially could have led to the classification of digital asset developers as securities brokers with grave implications for user privacy. The interpretation appears to additionally advance clarity on proposals in market structure drafts, which insufficiently defined what digital assets could be subject to broker/dealer registration requirements. The interpretation is a major win for privacy, as broker/dealers are required to implement KYC/AML programs by law. Find the full interpretation here: https://www.sec.gov/files/rules/interp/2026/33-11412.pdf

🔴Ethics disclosures reveal Tornado Cash top-prosecutor's ties to Epstein network Ethics disclosures show SDNY top prosecutor Jay Clayton holds up to $6M in Epstein affiliated Apollo Management, along with stock in JP Morgan and Bank of America, according to a new investigation by The Lever. Earlier this week, Clayton announced that SDNY will retry Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm on sanctions evasion and money laundering conspiracy charges. At the same time, citizens are demanding money laundering investigations into JPM and BoA over the potential enablement of Epstein's sex trafficking operation, which was in part financed by Apollo Management founder Leon Black, according to a $62M settlement agreement between Black and the US Virgin Islands. From 2021 to 2025, Clayton served as chair of the board and independent director at Apollo Management, a private equity firm founded by Black, who has been identified as one of Epstein's top financiers and closest associates. Clayton was appointed to the role at Apollo following Black's resignation over his ties to Epstein, with many describing Clayton's job as a 'clean up.'

🔴The Luxembourg government is allowing a state bank to act against the International Criminal Court, the Luxembourg Times reports. The incident is yet another example of the US extrajudicial weaponization of the global financial system against dissent. Since 2025, the Trump administration has placed sanctions on eleven ICC judges and prosecutors who led the effort of obtaining an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. While no sanctions have been placed on the ICC directly, the Luxembourg Spuerkeess decided to close two accounts held by the ICC to avoid potential regulatory repercussions. The sanctions are not enacted via Congressional approval but by executive order of the US president, prohibiting any US service to do business with sanctioned ICC personnel, directly limiting the ICC's operations through the cancelation of necessary services, such as email and accounting software. While the US officially holds no authority over international banks, its position as an economic superpower can effectively lead to the exclusion from global financial markets if its orders are not followed suit. The US was originally a signatory to the Rome Statute which established the ICC in 1998 under Bill Clinton, though the signature was never ratified. In 2002, the US formally "unsigned" the treaty under President Bush and established the American Service-Members' Protection Act, more commonly known as The Hague Invasion Act, which prevents US agencies from granting assistance to the ICC, and gives the US president all necessary mans to prevent the prosecution of US citizens by the ICC – including military action.

🔴An FBI Field Interview conducted as part of a federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein details how a Deutsche Bank compliance officer was terminated after raising flags over cryptocurrency activity conducted by a firm owned by Jared Kushner in 2016. In total, the compliance officer identified over 100 Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) who appeared to be insufficiently monitored by Deutsche Bank, detailing how she was pressured to keep accounts open – including the accounts of Epstein, after finding he had been making payments to young women. The document gives a rare glimpse into the world of so-called relationship managing, in which wealthy individuals are treated favorably by financial institutions even when flags are raised. While regular banking customers fall victim to overly-cautious account closures, the FBI report details how individuals with more substantive financial resources are continuously cut slack in anti-money laundering procedures in order to retain their business. [EFTA00128988

🔴The Trump administration appears to be illegally leveraging tax authorities to obtain the home addresses of immigrants, according to the Washington Post. A federal judge has found that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) violated federal law “approximately 42,695 times” when it shared confidential taxpayer addresses with immigration enforcement officials last summer, as WaPo reports. By federal law, the IRS may only provide the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with tax records if the agency first identifies a person's address correctly. Instead, the DHS appears to have used the information sharing agreement to obtain addresses from the IRS, with address fields left blank or filled out incompletely. The incident marks yet another escalation in the use of financial infrastructure to achieve political ends. DHS officials have defended the data-sharing agreement as necessary to crack down on illegal immigration. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/02/26/irs-data-federal-judge-dhs-illegal/

🔴The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has published a new report on cyber-enabled fraud, deeming peer-to-peer transactions and decentralized finance "money laundering infrastructure". Notably, the report offers no statistics to support such claims, and rather relies on anecdotal evidence that the increased use of virtual assets contributes to an increase in cybercrime related fraud. The FATF calls for greater payment transparency and the application of AI/Machine Learning for the tracing of funds, as well as for the implementation of FATF guidance for virtual assets, which could go as far as subjecting front-end developers and non-custodial wallets to anti-money laundering regulations.

🔴Senator Tom Cotton, who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has reposted a letter penned in October calling for the expansion of the PATRIOT Act and the Bank Secrecy Act to "prevent illegal aliens from opening accounts at US financial institutions." The PATRIOT Act formalized KYC procedures for financial institutions in 2001. Since then, no statistics have been released to confirm that KYC measures are in any way useful to stop financial crime, yet Congress continues to lobby for their expansion. The measures verifiably lead to skyrocketing compliance costs that are rolled onto consumers, which has emerged as a leading cause for un- and underbanked citizens.

🔴The Trump administration is considering an Executive Order that would require banks to collect citizenship information on customers, per the Wall Street Journal. As such, the proposed Executive Order would deputize banks to function as defacto policing agencies to crack down on illegal immigration. The Treasury is already pressuring banks to identify illegal immigrants and considering the potential re-underwriting of customers, as stated by Secretary Scott Bessent earlier this month.

🚨NEW: HOW AN INTERNATIONAL TAX ENFORCEMENT GROUP DESPERATELY TRIES TO SELL YOU MORE SURVEILLANCE The J5 says cryptocurrency services pose a systemic risk to the financial system – by drastically misrepresenting what suspicious activity reports (SARs) actually do. According to the reports, OTC desks and cryptocurrency service providers have seen a sharp increase in SARs filings since 2015, so even more surveillance is needed to root out the potential use of cryptocurrency for tax evasion, money laundering, and terrorist financing. What the reports omit is that SARs in no way indicate crime. In fact, the vast, vast majority of reports filed with regulators are of innocent people and innocuous transactions. US financial institutions file upward of 30 million reports on customers every year, and for those efforts, government agencies have fewer than 400 criminal investigations to show for. That is trillions of dollars of transactions surveilled, and millions of reports filed, resulting in only a few hundred criminal investigations. The problem, apparently, is not that the overbearing system fails, but that not everyone is inside it… yet. 🔗 Full story:

The Rage

How International Tax Enforcement Group Desperately Tries to Sell You More Surveillance

The J5 says cryptocurrency services pose a systemic risk to the financial system – by drastically misrepresenting what suspicious activity report...

🔴A former Revolut employee has reportedly attempted to extort customers by threatening to leak their personal KYC data unless a ransom was paid. The extortion attempt appears to have been targeted at a pseudonymous X account with over 650,000 followers. Revolut has reportedly stated that no systems have been breached, and that the case is under investigation. The case highlights yet another risk of identity verification beyond security breaches and leaks, in which internal rogue actors obtain access to individual's sensitive information. As KYC laws are set to be expanded beyond the financial realm to ID social media users, the extortion of high-value pseudonymous individuals will likely grow into a lucrative business for criminals.

🔴The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has approved the production of new reports focused on the mitigation of AML/CFT risks for "unhosted wallets" and peer-to-peer transactions. The reports are expected to be published by April of this year. "The United States appreciates the FATF’s efforts to prevent abuse of this critical industry," the Treasury said in a statement on the FATF plenary's outcomes on Friday. The FATF is an unelected, international body that drives global anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing legislation. Nations which deviate from FATF AML/CFT guidance are placed on black- and grey lists, cutting off access to global financial markets. 🔗 Learn more about FATF and its influence on Bitcoin:

The Rage

Meet FATF: The Financial Bullies Memberclub Trying To KYC The Planet

There's assholes, and then there's FATF. The Financial Action Task Force is an intergovernmental body created in 1989 to "combat money laundering ...

🔴The Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement have issued a warning on the use of cryptocurrency payment processors and OTC desks for money laundering and sanctions evasion. The group bases its warnings on the increase of Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) filings related to such systems, which have risen starkly over the past ten years. "Cryptocurrency payment processors pose significant risks and unknown threats to the integrity of the global financial system," the group concludes. However, the group omits that the mere filing of a SAR is often not indicative of actual crime occurring. Research based on statistics released by the IRS shows that less than 0.3% of filed SARs have led to further investigation. More SARs != more crime. The Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement (J5) is a joint operational group formed in mid-2018 to combat transnational tax crime between US, Australian, UK, Canadian, and Dutch tax authorities.

🚨The DOJ has quietly deleted over 2,000 documents on former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito. The collection originally featured over 10,000 documents on Ito, which is now down to ~8,000. Ito resigned from MIT in 2019 for accepting donations from Jeffrey Epstein, but their relationship appears to have gone much deeper than previously disclosed. According to his LinkedIn, Ito currently serves as President of the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan, where he also directs the Center for Radical Transformation.

🚨NEW: HACKERS EXPOSE AGE-VERIFICATION SOFTWARE POWERING SURVEILLANCE WEB Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet, bundling financial reporting with facial recognition tech. For the first time, they lay bare what is really behind a software serving age-verification laws – and why such technology is far from harmless. We spoke with the researchers that exposed the software, who hope that their findings will serve as a wakeup call. 🔗 Full story:

The Rage

Hackers Expose Age-Verification Software Powering Surveillance Web

Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet.

It’s not every day that we post “good news” from the IRS. But today, the Payjoin Foundation has been recognized as a 501c3 – which means you can now make tax deductible donations to fund Bitcoin privacy. Full story 👇

The Rage

You Can Now Make Tax-Deductible Donations to Fund Bitcoin Privacy

The Payjoin Foundation has been recognized as a 501(c)(3), so you can help break the link between Bitcoin payments on chain.

🚨NEW: REP LYNCH IS WRONG ON THE BANK SECRECY ACT The Massachusetts Congressman claims the BSA is "highly useful" to combat terrorism. The data says otherwise. Full story 👇

The Rage

Rep. Lynch is Wrong on the Bank Secrecy Act

The Massachusetts Congressman claims the BSA is "highly useful" to combat terrorism. The data says otherwise.

🚨NEW: NOTES FROM THE INSIDE "It often feels like I am stuck in a bad dream I cannot wake from," writes Samourai Wallet developer Keonne Rodriguez about his first month in FPC Morgantown. Read the full letter 👇

The Rage

Letter #4: Notes From The Inside

"It often feels like I am stuck in a bad dream I cannot wake from," writes Samourai Wallet developer Keonne Rodriguez about his first month in FPC ...