Long Reads
The $100 Company Behind a $2 Billion Casino
How online casinos can move dirty money, why Curaçao became their harbour, and what the leaked licence file of Stake, the world's best-known crypto casino, tells a compliance officer.
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9 articles published
Long Reads
Treasury follows Tren de Aragua's stolen ATM cash onto the blockchain
On 30 September the US Treasury sanctioned the network of an alleged Tren de Aragua malware engineer known as "Prometheus", and for the first time in a Treasury action against the gang it listed cryptocurrency addresses. Official records and blockchain analysts describe a network, based in Mexico and Venezuela, that allegedly launders cash stolen from American ATMs through cryptocurrency, notably stablecoins. Two days later "Prometheus" appeared in a Nebraska court after being detained in Venezuela. Blockchain tracing exposes the network's plumbing, but our own reading of the ledger shows most of the money had moved on long before the sanctions arrived.
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The SEC Did Not Say Your Token Is Not a Security
A staff FAQ on buybacks and liquid staking went viral as a green light for onchain finance. It is narrower than that, legally fragile, and it opens doors that some companies will be tempted to walk through.
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How Pokémon Cards Became a Vehicle for Dirty Money
A rectangle of cardboard now trades for the price of a private jet, carries no serial number and crosses borders in a coat pocket. Criminals worked that out before regulators did.
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Anonymous by design: the corporate-card route around KYC
They promise you can spend crypto without ever showing an ID. Behind the marketing lies a precise mechanism: the corporate-card loophole, where the identity that gets verified is a company's, not the person's who actually pays. On 10 July 2027, the European Union bans the anonymous prepaid card. Here is how the system works, who controls the taps, what could shut it down, and what a compliance analyst should see in it.
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Von der Leyen offers Canada 'associate member' status as Ottawa pivots to Europe
On 16 September 2026 European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed that Canada become the European Union's first ever 'associate member', a status that does not yet exist in the bloc's treaties. The next day Prime Minister Mark Carney told the European Parliament that Canada and Europe were 'stronger together', while framing the project as an alliance rather than membership and insisting on Canadian sovereignty. President Donald Trump has called the plan a 'hostile act' and threatened fresh tariffs on the EU.
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The camera is lying: forged IDs, deepfakes and injection tools are beating the selfie checks banks rely on
A forged ID costs $15. Deepfakes pass for faces. And a new class of tools skips the camera altogether. How the front door of digital finance is being picked, and which locks still hold.
Long Reads
“The Conflict Gave Us a Role We Didn't Have Before”: Inside a Russian Crypto Exchange
Le Détroit spent months persuading an insider at one of Russia's largest crypto exchanges to talk, then met him in Moscow City. His verdict on EU sanctions: too slow, and blind to his sector.
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Looted antiquities are easy to dig up and just as easy to launder, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi case shows why
We read the topic note as the laundering of looted antiquities, seen through the testimony of Vincent Michel, a University of Poitiers archaeologist who has advised French police and customs since 2011. His argument, made under oath to the French Senate in April 2025, is that laundering a looted object is as simple as looting it. Four years after Jean-Luc Martinez was charged, the Louvre Abu Dhabi case has produced its first money-laundering convictions, in Hamburg, while the Paris case has no trial date
