Federal agency reports nearly 600% increase in licenses stripped from money services firms

OTTAWA — Canada’s financial intelligence agency will report Monday that it stripped the licences last year of more than seven times as many money services operations as the previous year, part of an increased emphasis on a sector that can play a key role in money laundering and some other financial crimes.

The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) will say in its annual report that it revoked licences for 82 money services businesses in Canada in 2025-26, compared to 12 a year earlier and 17 in 2023-24.

The report says last year’s dramatic increase in that element of the financial services industry was part of a year characterized by record levels of enforcement actions as FINTRAC and its police allies battled fraud, extortion, human trafficking, fentanyl and a wide range of illegal activities.

At the same time, the challenge for financial intelligence officials continues to grow as the growth of the digital world has led to an increasingly large and sophisticated number of online criminals.

The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre has said that Canadians were scammed out of $704-million in online fraud in 2025, about three times the figure from just five years earlier. The federal government has said that less than 10 per cent of these types of scams are reported to authorities.

The money service business is divided into those with store fronts, including big players such as Western Union and Money Mart, and those who operate online only, including many that are based overseas. The industry, which includes those who transfer money or exchange currencies, has 3,396 registered operations, a sharp increase from 2,778 in the previous year.

According to its annual report, FINTRAC also fined nine money services businesses for a total of more than $198 million for a variety of violations, including failing to register and other forms of non-compliance, and not reporting large virtual currency transactions.

In one of the larger cases, FINTRAC imposed an administrative monetary penalty in July, 2025 of $19.6-million on Peken Global Limited (which also operates as KuCoin) for failing to register with FINTRAC, failing to report large virtual currency transactions on 2,952 separate occasions, and “failing to report suspicious transactions” on 33 occasions. Some of those transactions were linked to darknet marketplaces, questionable gambling sites and illegal activities.

In another case, where a company hadn’t registered, the investigation led in September 2025 to the RCMP seizing more than $56-million in cryptocurrency, the largest crypto seizure in Canadian history.

The information gathering within the sector can be “crucial to our ability to ensure and enforce compliance and track the proceeds of crime across jurisdictions,” FINTRAC chief executive officer Stéphane Sirard wrote in the report.

Like online crime, authorities’ efforts have also been on the climb.

FINTRAC reported last year that it easily set a new record in the number of cases that it sent to police for possible criminal investigation. And the organization said this spring that extortion cases have increased more than sixfold over the first four months of the year, with a growing number of those crimes committed against Canadians by criminal organizations with direct ties to India and elsewhere in south Asia.

The annual report says FINTRAC generated 122 financial intelligence disclosures in support of police investigations of extortion over the last year, for example, leading to the identification of 336 people of interest.

Local police forces in larger communities and the federal government have taken steps to try to respond to the growth of online crimes. The Liberal government announced late last year that it would launch a new Financial Crimes Agency, aimed at trying to improve Canada’s ability to tackle online scams, money laundering and other types of fraud

The fight against such crimes also got some help earlier this year from legislative changes to the Bank Act. The new rules require banks and other financial institutions to play a bigger and more proactive role in detecting and fighting fraud.

Many local police forces, particularly in larger cities, have also made the fight against financial crimes a priority in recent years, allocating resources to new technology and hiring specialists.

National Post

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