As a recent report by blockchain data firm Chainalysis points out, the ties between crypto and suspected human trafficking intensified during 2025, with transaction volume reaching hundreds of millions of dollars, an 85% increase over the prior year.
“The dollar amounts significantly understate the human toll of these crimes, where the true cost is measured in lives impacted rather than money transferred,” the company wrote on its blog.
Chainalysis notes that this surge of crypto funds into suspected human trafficking services is not happening in a vacuum, but is closely tied with the rise of Southeast Asia-based scam compounds, online gambling sites, and Chinese-language money laundering networks.
While cash transactions leave no trace, “the transparency of blockchain technology provides unprecedented visibility into these operations, creating unique opportunities for detection and disruption that would be impossible with traditional payment methods,” the report added.
The company says its analysis tracked four main categories of suspected cryptocurrency-facilitated human trafficking.
These include “international escort” services, or Telegram-based services that are suspected to traffic in people, as well as “labor placement” agents, or Telegram-based services that help operate kidnapping and forced labor for scam compounds.
The report also found ties between crypto flows and prostitution networks, as well as the use of crypto among people accessing child sexual abuse material.
PYMNTS spoke last month with Eric Jardine, head of research for Chainalysis, about the explosion in crypto crime recorded last year. An estimated $154 billion flowed to illicit addresses in 2025, the highest total on record and a 160% jump in illegal volumes.
However, treating that number as evidence of runaway criminal adoption may miss the more consequential story, the report added. What changed last year was not just volume, but the identity of the actors, the scale at which they functioned, and the implications this has for banks, regulators and the future of financial blockchain compliance.
The true inflection came from “a shift in who’s doing what,” Jardine said, noting that in 2025, nation states, most notably Russia, began taking part “in earnest in the crypto ecosystem,” chiefly through sanctions evasion.
Compared to past state-linked activity like North Korea’s hacking campaigns, this was not marginal behavior at the edges of the system, but industrial-scale activity in plain sight.
“Sanction evasion by a nation state at scale can hit tremendously large volumes,” Jardine said, adding blockchain finance did not all of the sudden become more criminal but rather more geopolitically relevant.
