Russia-linked crooks bought a bank for Christmas to launder cyber loot

On Christmas Day 2024, a Russian-linked laundering network bought itself a very special present: a controlling stake in a Kyrgyzstan bank, later used to wash cybercrime profits and funnel money into Moscow's war machine, according to the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA).

The network, exposed through the NCA's long-running Operation Destabilise, has been sucking up dirty cash across at least 28 UK towns and cities, converting it into cryptocurrency, and using that crypto to move funds through a bank it quietly acquired in Kyrgyzstan. That bank, Keremet, was later identified as facilitating cross-border payments for Promsvyazbank, the Russian state-owned lender that bankrolls companies in the military-industrial base.

For a fee, couriers working the UK end of the network collect cash from drugs, firearms, and immigration crime, then hand it to operators who push it through "cash-to-crypto" swaps. The NCA says those swaps sit at the heart of ...