United for a Whole of Society Battle: VerifyVASP’s Commitment to Combating Fraud and Scams

VerifyVASP is honoured to have joined over 1,400 delegates from over 124 countries, many of which represented at ministerial level, at the Global Fraud Summit 2026 (GFS) at UNODC in Vienna on 16-17 March.

Fraud is a global issue and is exacerbated by the borderless nature of virtual assets, with fraudsters stealing billions from people and businesses. It cuts across sectors and is growing across countries.  In 2025, the global losses related to financial fraud reached an estimate of over US$400 billion.

Among the plenary discussions and the side events over the two-day Summit, the role of virtual assets as a subject of frauds (primarily investment frauds) and means of payment has been a recurring subject, as the total value of illicit cryptoasset transactions reached an all-time high of US$158 billion.

VerifyVASP supports the responsible growth of the Web3 industry through objective-based compliance to Recommendation 16. We are thankful for the opportunity to participate at the Summit. This was an opportunity to represent the industry that Web3 can actually do things better by showcasing our Travel Rule and analytics capabilities which help prevent frauds (particularly impersonation scams) and support Financial Intelligence Units (FIU) reporting and Law Enforcement Agency’s (LEA) subsequent investigation, fund tracing and asset recovery efforts.

At GFS, we had the privilege of hearing from, and exchanging views with ministers, policymakers, law enforcement authorities, and other private sector partners. Here are the issues which stood out:

1. Cryptoassets as evolving trend: Policymakers and law enforcement authorities converge on the growing trend for criminals to involve cryptoassets in fraud schemes. Europol named it as the largest subject since the pandemic and its omnipresence in almost all investment frauds.
2. Time is of essence in fund tracing and recovery: Modern frauds have moved away from small, opportunistic attacks to cyber/AI-enabled industrial-scale scam compounds. With the speed of on-chain value transfer and advanced laundering techniques (such as “chain-hopping” and use of “mule” virtual asset service providers), real-time information sharing is crucial for tracing and freezing funds. As Egmont Group put it, for victims under distress, asset recovery is more urgent than conviction.
3. Implementation of Travel Rule and the strengthened FATF R.16 payment transparency standard: Key international standard setting bodies and organisations including the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), Asia-Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG), International Monetary Fund (IMF) all emphasised the need to ensure the robust implementation of Travel Rule and the revised FATF Recommendation 16 (scheduled for 2030) as a core measure to enhance transparency.  
4. Partnerships are integral: There is a strong need for a whole-of-society approach to fight fraud, ranging from raising awareness and risk assessment to identify fraud corridors, to ensuring robust anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing controls among supervisors and VASPs, and to investigation and asset recovery efforts among LEAs. To achieve this, Public Private Partnerships (PPP) on information sharing and building technical capabilities are required to gear up against fraudsters.
5. Value of data: Both supervisors and LEAs emphasise the value of data in conducting upstream risk assessment and pattern analysis, early identification of fraud corridors and victims, and downstream analytics and fund tracing.

VerifyVASP’s Role in Fighting Frauds

At VerifyVASP, we believe that the industry can do better to prevent frauds from immutable public blockchain data, combined with verified data collected in proper objective-based Travel Rule compliance. This has been proven to thwart and deter fraud and other illicit activity, orenhance tracing and investigation capabilities of both public and private sector stakeholders:

1. Verified Network Architecture – Virtual cloud of connected and verified VASPs enables counterparty layer due diligence helps with the identification of the VASP at the legal entity level (this in turn alleviates the issue of where to serve official notices to). We adopt the FATF Recommendation 10 (Customer Due Diligence) during onboarding and additionally verifying for factuality a comprehensive due diligence questionnaire adapted from the Wolfsberg Correspondence Banking Due-Diligence Questionaire (for Virtual Assets and technology risk management) (CBDQQ). This helps reduce risk of offshore VASPs and supports intra-VASP counterparty due diligence obligations. This (due-diligence) has proven to be an effective regulatory tool to level up the AML risk compliance mitigants among VASPs.

2. Pre-transcation Verification of Beneficiary Information - Given the immutable nature of blockchain transactions, which results in complications of post-transaction fund reversal and recovery on a blockchain, VerifyVASP advocates pre-transaction verification of beneficiary information, which is in-line with the confirmation/verification of payee (CoP/VoP) approach suggested by the FATF revised Recommendation 16, so that we can achieve the objective “to prevent terrorists, money launderers, and other criminals from having unfettered access to wire transfers and electronic value transfers for moving their funds”. Through the VerifyName protocol, we provide critical enhanced risk mitigation measure by verifying, and restricting transactions to only 1st-party transactions, complemented by wallet and name screening. Members who have Implemented these measures have provided feedback that this dramatically reduces impersonation scams and fraudulent VASP activities. 

3. Law Enforcement Solutions (LES) – Public blockchain data, combined with verified Travel Rule data, brings value to supervision and enforcement. LES is a non–commercial AI-driven tracing tool offered to the public sector (LEAs, FIUs, and Regulators) for effective and quick tracing by combining blockchain data with VerifyVASP's verified transactional information accumulated through objective-based Travel Rule compliance. This is a non-commercial solution with the purpose of speeding up fund tracing, investigation and asset recovery.

4. Public Private Partnerships - VerifyVASP is an active contributor and participant in various PPP initiatives established internationally and regionally to jointly combat illicit activity in the industry. We also run workshops and roundtables for public and private sectors across jurisdictions regularly to facilitate regulatory understanding and develop best practices in local and international regions demonstrating our commitment to providing technical assistance wherever possible.

Our Pledge on Combatting Fraud through Partnerships

As a Travel Rule solution provider which holds robustness and integrity of data close to our hearts, we are honoured to join the global partners in committing to fighting fraud. We pledge to expand LES usage for public authorities at no cost, and offer technical assistance through partnering with international organisations and individual LEAs, FIUs and regulators, to strengthen their capacity in detecting and investigating frauds.

Join VerifyVASP in the global battle to disrupt frauds, and make the digital asset ecosystem a better place. 

Read our Pledge at: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/organized-crime/global-fraud-summit/pledges.html

The time is now for us to all come together as a whole of society to jointly combat fraud and other illicit activity in order to promote the safe and accountable growth of the Web3 industry.