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A fraud scheme can touch a bank, a cryptocurrency exchange, a victim in one state, and investigators in several others. Each participant may see a legitimate part of the case. None necessarily sees the entire operation.
That fragmentation is the challenge behind Nasdaq Chair and CEO Adena Friedman's October 20, 2026, call for a U.S. National Fraud Strategy. Her message was straightforward. The response to organized financial crime must become more connected.
In her October 20 remarks, Friedman cited Nasdaq's Global Financial Crime Report, which estimated that $4.4 trillion in illicit funds were laundered through the global financial system in 2025, and more than $500 billion was lost to fraud.
The Federal Trade Commission reported that U.S. consumers lost $15.9 billion to fraud in 2025, including $7.9 billion in investment scams and $3.5 billion in imposter scams.
These losses underscore why financial institutions, technology providers, and investigators need to recognize related criminal activity across organizational boundaries.
A recent international operation illustrates the value of cooperation. On October 22, the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Interior announced that Operation Confrontation Ghost, involving authorities from 30 countries and private-sector partners, had identified more than $39 billion in funds and cryptocurrencies linked to scams.
Friedman described how Nasdaq Verafin's consortium network across 2,800 banks helped uncover a coordinated fraud ring involving more than 1,000 accounts at over 45 financial institutions.
Individually, the alerts looked unrelated. Across the network, a larger pattern emerged.
Her remarks included a concise observation: “It takes a network to fight a network.”
The lesson extends beyond banking.
Financial institutions can detect patterns within transactions and accounts, while law enforcement holds case-specific intelligence such as victim complaints, investigative identifiers, and legal process.
Those perspectives can reinforce one another without becoming the same system.
As digital asset adoption expands, criminals can exploit wallets, exchanges, and cross-border transfers that also serve legitimate activity. That makes responsible coordination across different systems more important.
Consider a cryptocurrency wallet reported by victims in two jurisdictions.
One police department may already be investigating it. Another may encounter it weeks later. A bank may separately flag related customer activity.
Even if all three organizations act diligently, they may not know the others have relevant information.
Blockchain analytics can help follow fund movements. Bank monitoring can detect suspicious account activity.
Investigative deconfliction addresses a distinct question: Does another authorized investigator have an overlapping lead, and can the right people connect?
Better coordination does not mean placing every case file or customer record into a central database.
The goal is to identify overlapping investigative information while allowing agencies to maintain control of their investigations.
When relevant connections are identified, investigators need a secure way to communicate, exchange appropriate information, and coordinate their efforts.
This allows agencies to work together without requiring them to combine their investigations or surrender control of sensitive information.
Deconflict is a vendor-neutral investigative deconfliction network, initially focused on cryptocurrency-enabled financial crime.
The platform helps participating law enforcement agencies identify overlapping investigative leads and connect with one another while keeping their underlying investigations separate.
Deconflict was founded by Mudassar Malik, a former U.S. Secret Service special agent with more than two decades of law enforcement experience investigating complex financial crime.
That experience helped shape the company's approach to a longstanding challenge in law enforcement: the fragmentation of investigative intelligence across jurisdictions.
As Malik explains:
“The United States has thousands of law enforcement agencies investigating crimes that cross jurisdictional boundaries, yet critical investigative information remains fragmented across agencies and systems. Two departments can be investigating the same criminal network without knowing the other investigation exists. That lack of visibility is a fundamental problem in how we fight financial crime, and it's one of the reasons we built Deconflict.”
Deconflict does not replace bank consortiums, transaction monitoring, or blockchain analytics.
It addresses a different gap: helping investigators discover when their work overlaps and enabling the appropriate parties to coordinate.
Financial institutions and law enforcement bring different perspectives to financial crime investigations. Connecting those perspectives responsibly can improve visibility into criminal networks operating across institutions and jurisdictions.
Friedman's call for a National Fraud Strategy highlights an important reality: financial crime is increasingly interconnected, but the organizations responsible for detecting and investigating it often operate within separate systems.
The banking industry's experience demonstrates what becomes possible when institutions can identify patterns beyond their individual organizations.
Law enforcement faces a similar opportunity.
The future of financial crime prevention will not depend on one organization collecting every piece of intelligence. It will depend on trusted systems that allow relevant information to reach the right people when it matters.
The question is no longer simply whether organizations can collect more intelligence.
It is whether they can recognize when another authorized party already holds the missing piece, and how quickly they can connect.
When those connections lead to timely action, investigators and financial institutions have a better chance of disrupting a scheme before it reaches the next victim.
Financial crime information sharing helps authorized organizations connect relevant information about suspected fraud and other financial crimes. It can reveal links between activity at different institutions or in different jurisdictions that would otherwise remain difficult to see.
Banks can identify suspicious transactions and account activity, while investigators may hold victim reports and related investigative leads. Connecting these perspectives can help the appropriate parties recognize a wider scheme and coordinate their response.
Investigative deconfliction identifies when separate investigations involve an overlapping lead, such as the same cryptocurrency wallet. It helps the investigators find one another and coordinate while keeping their underlying investigations separate.
No. Coordination can begin by identifying a relevant overlap and connecting the authorized parties. Agencies can retain control of their investigations and determine what additional information is appropriate to exchange.
Blockchain analytics examines fund movements, and transaction monitoring identifies suspicious account activity. Deconflict helps participating law enforcement agencies discover overlapping investigative leads and connect with one another, adding coordination alongside those tools.
Deconflict adds verified law enforcement intelligence to a financial institution’s review of a cryptocurrency wallet. Teams can see whether an address has been reported by law enforcement and connect with the reporting investigator through controlled communication. This provides additional context for alert reviews and escalation decisions while the institution retains responsibility for its own decisions and legal obligations.