Berlin, Germany – In a major setback for dark financial dealings, police have shut down the cryptocurrency exchange platform eXch after they had conducted a large scale investigation regarding money laundering. The action was taken by the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt or BKA) on April 30, 2025 when it raided the platform and confiscated its online infrastructure and assets.
The probe concluded that the alleged laundering operation, run by the firm eXch, which had been active since 2014, involved some $1.9 billion (or €1.7 billion at today’s exchange rates of the British pound). Authorities also seized €34 million’s worth of cryptocurrency (about $38.25 million), among them Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin and Dash, as well as 8 terabytes of data.
The BKA said eXch ran on both the open web and dark web and was a cryptocurrency swapping service. Amazingly, the platform is said to have “publicly advertised on the criminal underground economy (UE) and stated that it provided obtain it without anti-money laundering.” This lack of a compliance for regulation allowed the trading of digital currency without KYC verification or storing data, enabling the laundering of criminal proceeds.
The operation was jointly coordinated by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, Europol, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Dutch National Police, the Frankfurt General Prosecutor’s Office and the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation. This international partnership demonstrates that everyone needs to be working together to fight crime relating to cryptocurrency.
“The fact that eXch was shut down speaks for itself: we do not accept that crypto-currency platforms are used for criminal transactions,” a BKA spokesman said. “We will keep working with our international partners to disrupt such networks and safeguard the integrity of the financial system.”
Investigators are now examining the confiscated information, and additional arrests may be made as well as valuable evidence collected for subsequently unravelling money laundering activities related to digital currencies. This bust is one of the biggest ever of a cryptocurrency company for money laundering, illustrating the rising scrutiny that law enforcement is placing on their digital asset industry.
