Crypto Playing ‘Growing Role’ in Crime Across Western Balkans: NGO

Criminals are making increasing use of cryptocurrency in Western Balkan nations such as Albania and Serbia, according to research from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC).

Writing in one of two new risk bulletins for this month, the Geneva-based NGO found that seizing illicitly sourced crypto remains a big challenge in the Balkans, with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia home to “only three documented cases of crypto asset seizures” to date.

The bulletin explained that the illegal use of crypto has grown in tandem with more legitimate uses, as transaction volumes in the region sit somewhere between $25 billion and $30 billion.

It’s in this context that Montenegro has become a major European node for the use of crypto on darknet marketplaces, while using crypto to launder the proceeds of drug trafficking has grown in recent years in Albania and Serbia, as per an earlier GI-TOC bulletin from December.

Sasa Djordjevic, GI-TOC’s senior analyst for the Western Balkans, told Decrypt that cryptocurrencies are “playing a growing role in criminal activity in the Western Balkans,” with the region also seeing a growth in use for fraud and illegal crypto-mining.

“Drug trafficking groups are increasingly using crypto to move and hide their profits,” he said. “Some suspicious transactions linked to criminal networks from the Western Balkans are worth tens of millions of euros, often routed through crypto wallets and reinvested into legal businesses.”

Djordjevic also notes that such patterns tend to mirror known cocaine trafficking routes from Latin America to Europe, while GI-TOC has observed connections between criminal actors in the Western Balkans and darknet markets such as Hydra, prior to its shutdown in 2022.

A growing problem

GI-TOC’s latest bulletin suggests that illicit usage will continue growing in the region, given that local authorities are struggling to keep up with such usage in terms of regulations, technical expertise and cross-border cooperation.

“Currently, only three out of six Western Balkan countries have adopted laws on digital assets, and implementation has yet to begin in one of them,” explained Djordjevic.

The three countries Djordjevic is referring to here are Albania, Serbia and Kosovo, the latter of which introduced cryptocurrency legislation in November—but the bylaws necessary for implementation have not yet been adopted.

“Although the EU’s MiCA regulation offers a path toward stronger oversight, full and consistent implementation across the region remains challenging, as the Western Balkans are not yet part of the EU,” he added. “Until regulatory and enforcement capacities are strengthened, the region will remain vulnerable to illicit crypto activity.”

As mentioned above, the Western Balkans has only three documented cases of crypto seizure, all of which occurred in the last couple of years.

The most recent of these involved the seizure of assets belonging to an Albanian crime syndicate, which was the target of an operation between November 2024 and January 2025.

Working in conjunction with an unidentified stablecoin operator and a major crypto-exchange, forces from Albania, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Europol seized the gang’s cash, bank accounts and other property, including hardware wallets containing $10 million in cryptocurrencies.

Playing catch-up

However, such examples are still few and far between, and for Djordjevic and GI-TOC, the situation won’t improve until the region’s authorities catch up with the pace of change.

This not only means that governments should “adopt and enforce clear regulations” for tracing and seizing illicit crypto, but that law enforcement must “invest in advanced blockchain tools” and specialized training.

“Implementing FATF recommendations and EU rules on crypto remains key, particularly for countries previously on the FATF grey list,” Djordjevic said, adding that  closer cooperation with Europol, Interpol and other national agencies is also a necessity.

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