11 December 2025
– Europol dismantles international network of crypto-currency fraud and money-laundry
Last week Europol announced a major international operation that dismantled a cryptocurrency fraud and money-laundering network responsible for laundering more than EUR 700 million. The coordinated action exposed the use of fake investment platforms, social-engineering call centers, cross-border crypto-laundering structures, and, critically, affiliate-marketing systems designed to target victims through deceptive advertising and impersonation of reputable outlets. The operation, carried out across several jurisdictions with the support of multiple EU member states and partner countries, confirmed that affiliate-marketing infrastructure formed a key pillar of the criminal ecosystem.
Qurium takes this opportunity to highlight the deepening links between the online advertising economy, disinformation networks, hate-speech ecosystems, and large-scale financial fraud. Years of Qurium’s forensic investigations into disinformation, coordinated manipulation, and targeted harassment on social-media platforms have shown that the same infrastructure used to spread harmful content is exploited to promote fraudulent investment schemes. Throughout these investigations, Qurium uncovered extensive use of black-hat affiliate-marketing techniques, including the cloning of reputable media websites, the fabrication of news articles and endorsements, or the use of traffic-distribution systems to bypass any form of social-media moderation. These methods enable fraud operators to funnel victims into sophisticated scam systems while avoiding detection, mirroring the deceptive practices used in political influence operations.
Qurium, in coordination with several media partners, uncovered the scale and organization of fraudulent marketing networks responsible for driving victims to crypto-investment scams and related financial schemes. This collaborative work, most recently reflected in the Scam Empire investigation, demonstrated how cloned media sites, deepfake promotional videos, call-center operations, and aggressive affiliate-advertising pipelines together form a highly structured global fraud industry.
These developments closely align with new reporting from Reuters showing that Meta was aware of the vast scale of scam-linked advertising on its platforms. Internal Meta documents reportedly estimated that around ten percent of the company’s 2024 revenue originated from ads tied to scams or prohibited goods, and that users were exposed to billions of high-risk ads every day. According to the reporting, Meta’s internal systems often flagged suspicious advertisers, yet the company allowed many to continue operating unless the assessed probability of fraud exceeded an extremely high threshold. These revelations demonstrate that the monetization mechanisms of major platforms are routinely exploited by fraudulent networks and that insufficient oversight enables scams to spread at extraordinary scale.
The convergence of Europol’s findings, civil-society investigations, and internal platform disclosures makes clear that affiliate-marketing is no longer a peripheral component of online commerce but a central mechanism driving modern digital fraud and political influence. The same systems that amplify disinformation and hate speech are being repurposed to harvest victims for criminal organizations and to manipulate public opinion for political actors. The use of cloned media sites and fabricated endorsements provides a false sense of legitimacy that enables these operations to thrive in trusted digital environments.
It is time to shed even more light on the necessary participation of financial institutions, social-media platforms, and advertising networks in enabling scam operations, whether through negligence, weak oversight, or direct profit incentives. Fraud and corruption do not only devastate victims financially; they also erode public confidence in institutions, weaken trust in the justice system, and undermine the integrity of democratic processes by creating the perception that powerful actors can operate without accountability.
Public reports
[4 Dec, 2025] Malta Today, “Malta part of Europe-wide sting on crypto fraudsters“
[4 Dec 2025] Die Bayerisch Polizei, “Betrügerische Werbung mit prominenten Personen und Politikern – länderübergreifende Aktion gegen Online-Marketing-Infrastruktur”
[4 Dec 2025] Spanish Police, “Desarticulada una organización criminal que blanqueó más de 700 millones de euros con criptomonedas“
[4 Dec 2025] Mossos d’Esquadra (Catalan police force), X.com
[4 Nov 2025] European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, “Decisive actions against cryptocurrency scammers earning over EUR 600 million“
[4 Nov 2025] OCCRP, Europe-Wide Crackdown Targets Crypto Fraud, 600M Euros Stolen