Hong Kong's 56 months and Chainalysis's $14bn both point at the stablecoin off-ramp

Set the file's two largest figures beside each other. The traced on-chain flow into fraud-linked wallets for 2025 comes to roughly 3.2 percent of the $442 billion INTERPOL attributes to global fraud losses that year ^[1][2].

That gap admits two readings, and Chainalysis picks one: it expects its own 2025 total to climb past $17 billion as further scam wallets are identified ^[4], a 21 percent upward revision to a number already in print ^[2]. Labelling trails the money. A risk model calibrated to the published aggregate is calibrated to a figure its author has said is too low.

Seizure numbers are lumpier than flow numbers. The DOJ indictment of Prince Group's Chen Zhi came with a Bitcoin seizure of around $15 billion ^[14], which exceeds the entire traced year of fraud wallet inflows by about 7 percent ^[4]. Value at that scale surfaces through case files, not wallet screening.

The account of stablecoin preference is mechanical: the tokens hold value in transit and convert into local currency through laundering networks operating in China ^[5]. The control point is the conversion, not the transfer, and conversion is where exchanges sit. INTERPOL's illustration of what arrives there is a 20-year-old suspect located in Thailand with more than $122.5 million in romance scam transactions over 10 months ^[9], about $12.25 million a month ^[5], routed through cross-chain swaps meant to obscure origin. Single-chain screening sees a fragment of that.

UNODC's 2026 report describes Southeast Asian syndicates as separate businesses sharing infrastructure, with most criminal profit laundered on blockchain networks ^[10]. Delphine Schantz, the agency's regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, calls the model "corporate franchising: imagine specialised departments for laundering money, trafficking people, smuggling migrants, and harvesting data" ^[11]. An onboarding desk meeting one of those laundering departments sees a client whose entire business is conversion volume, and nothing about the fraud that produced it.

The Hong Kong arithmetic is worth reading closely for what it prices. The court set a seven-year base and removed a third for the guilty plea ^[15]. Ma Che-hou, 32, admitted conspiracy to defraud and money laundering across 2021 and 2022 after persuading five men aged 20 to 32 with offers of well-paid work, business opportunities or online romance ^[6]; some ended up held at KK Park in Myanmar, where they were tortured with electric shocks ^[7].

The ledger also does not close. Moving 2025 from $14 billion toward $17 billion is last year being re-scored with this year's labels, and the same re-scoring will reach the transactions exchanges cleared while those labels did not exist.