Beyond Anecdotes: Terrorist Financing Has Moved to Crypto
Six years of data on terrorist financing proves it
This week, we’re taking a close look at how terrorists move money. Drawing on our Trends in Terrorist Financing 2020-2025 dataset, we can now say with authority that it wasn’t just a blip: terrorist financing mostly happens through cryptocurrency now. Have a read to learn about the data behind this bold statement, and what it means for the future of countering the financing of terrorism.
The Data
This research grew out of frustration with claims about “new” or “increasing” terrorist-financing trends that are made without evidence. To address this, the project built its own empirical foundation by systematically collecting and coding real-world cases of terrorist financing over the past eight years. Each case captures reported financial activity used to support terrorism and is analyzed using a six-part framework that examines how funds are raised, used, moved, stored, managed, and concealed. The approach emphasizes observable activity.
The data are drawn exclusively from open sources, including media reporting, court documents, and government publications, and are subjected to a multi-stage validation process to ensure consistency and accuracy. The resulting dataset contains more than 21,000 data points across 1,150 cases, coded across 19 variables such as country, group, financing methods, and sources. While collection began in 2018, analysis relies on cases from 2020 onward, when data quality became sufficiently robust. Together, this methodology provides a rare evidence-based foundation for assessing terrorist-financing trends and testing claims about how those activities evolve over time.
Learn more here.
When Terrorists Used Banks
When Illicit Money was published in 2021, banks remained the primary channel through which terrorists moved money internationally, despite more than two decades of sustained counter-terrorist financing efforts. This persistence reflects a core challenge in CTF: terrorist financing is extraordinarily difficult to detect within the formal financial system. Large organizations such as Hamas and Hizballah have relied on complex front-company networks to obscure illicit activity, while small cells and lone actors typically move modest sums that attract little scrutiny.
In practice, many terrorist transactions closely resemble ordinary remittances or everyday financial activity, making them hard to distinguish from legitimate flows. The amounts involved are frequently below mandatory reporting thresholds, which vary by jurisdiction but are easily circumvented in the context of terrorist financing. Detection becomes even more challenging when terrorist networks benefit from a trusted insider within a financial institution or affiliated business, further blurring the line between licit and illicit activity.
Crypto Enters the Chat
Around 2022, a noticeable shift emerged in terrorist financing patterns, with cryptocurrency appearing with increasing frequency across cases. This change intersects with nearly every aspect of my investigative, research, and policy work, reflecting how digital assets have moved from the margins to the mainstream of terrorist money movement. Today, cryptocurrency is present in roughly 8–12 percent of documented cases and has become the most visible method for moving funds, in part because it dominates in volume and is easier to observe, trace, and publicly report on than many traditional methods like hawala.
Keep reading to find out how we know this, and what it means for the future of counterterrorist financing:
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