UK Firms Offboarded 238,396 Suspected Money Mules
Account closures are rising faster than National Fraud Database filings, while the alternatives are voluntary, transaction-specific or unevenly acted upon.
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UK financial firms reported offboarding 238,396 suspected money mules in 2025. Only 15.3% of those customers were also filed to the National Fraud Database.
The gap does not show that firms failed to report 84.7% of proven criminals. Closing an account and placing a fraud marker against a person are different decisions with different evidence thresholds. It does, however, expose a practical question: when one provider closes an account on suspicion, how quickly can another provider learn enough to stop the same identity or linked account being used elsewhere?
The Financial Conduct Authority's new review does not supply a market-wide answer. It shows that several sharing routes exist. It also shows why none can yet be treated as a complete, measured substitute for a National Fraud Database filing.
The 84.7% is not unreported crime
The FCA surveyed 35 retail banks, building societies, challenger banks, payment institutions and electronic money institutions. They reported 184,935 suspected-mule offboardings in 2023, 233,269 in 2024 and 238,396 in 2025. Across the three years, the firms made 113,655 National Fraud Database filings. The filing share fell from 17.4% in 2024 to 15.3% in 2025.
Those figures compare customers offboarded on suspicion with cases meeting Cifas filing rules. A money-mule filing requires reasonable grounds to believe fraud or financial crime was committed or attempted, backed by clear, relevant and rigorous evidence. An account provider can end a relationship at a lower suspicion threshold.
The series also changes definition. Cifas recorded money-mule cases within the broader misuse-of-facility category in 2023 and 2024. It introduced a dedicated "funds received for money muling" category, revised criteria and guidance in 2025. The FCA explicitly says the 2025 filing data are not directly comparable with the previous two years.
That is why subtracting 15.3% from 100% produces heat, not information. It mixes suspicion with an evidentially supported fraud marker. The relevant control question is what happens in the space between them.
The substitute signals do different jobs
The National Fraud Database is broad once a case enters it. Cifas says its data are shared online in real time among a membership spanning banking, insurance, telecoms, retail and the public sector. Members can search identities and use a marker to trigger enhanced checks rather than an automatic refusal.
Its limit is the filing gate. The FCA said in a 2025 review of 13 firms that only confirmed fraud cases could be filed, leaving suspected mules outside that wider channel. Only one firm in that review was checking existing customers against the database in real time after onboarding. In one case, a new marker went undetected for more than two years.
The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act offers a lower-friction legal route, not a universal alert. Since January 2024, regulated firms have been able to share customer information directly, or through eligible intermediaries, to prevent, detect or investigate economic crime. The government guidance makes the scheme voluntary. A warning can follow a decision to close, refuse or restrict a customer's service, but direct sharing still goes to an identified recipient. The government does not prescribe a common technical system, and the published guidance gives no adoption rate, coverage measure or median time from offboarding to warning.
Payment-network tracing solves a different problem. A commercially available tool reviewed by the FCA traces suspected proceeds across Faster Payments, sends regular alerts and shows how funds move between accounts. Providers holding alerted accounts can investigate. Yet firms treated the alerts as leads requiring corroboration, not proof. Most investigated first-generation alerts; they were less responsive at later generations, sometimes because an internal value threshold was not met.
Direct bank-to-bank enquiries can supply evidence needed for a Cifas filing, but the same FCA review recorded delayed or absent responses from the firm that sent the funds. Suspicious Activity Reports inform the National Crime Agency and law enforcement. They do not place a reusable private-sector marker in another provider's onboarding or customer-monitoring system, and firms must observe tipping-off rules.
The channels therefore complement one another. They do not establish that every suspected identity becomes visible across banks, payment firms and EMIs before it reappears.
The cash-out window is short
The operational cost of that uncertainty appears in the FCA's second exercise. A public-private cell of 22 firms traced the highest-value payment in 140 cases across seven fraud types. Cash-out activity was concentrated from the second to the fifth account in a chain, and was highest at the second.
This was a selected case cell, not a representative estimate of all UK mule activity. It cannot establish an incidence rate or prove that a particular firm's control failed. It does show that a warning that arrives several hops later may be accurate and still be too late.
Two other FCA figures need the same restraint. EMI offboarding rose 164.6% in 2025, but the regulator says higher volumes can reflect customer growth and better detection as well as greater exposure. Separately, 114,984 accounts were closed within their first year, 47.1% of the account-tenure return. That return counts accounts, can count more than one account per offboarded customer and does not reveal when mule use began.
The Home Office's 2026 to 2029 Fraud Strategy promises data and metrics to drive financial-sector accountability. Money-mule sharing now needs that treatment. The useful measures are the median time from closure to an actionable warning, the proportion of account providers reached, the proportion of existing customers re-screened, and the response time at the second through fifth accounts in a traced chain.
The FCA is working with the National Economic Crime Centre on a further alert to relevant firms. That can spread the cell's typologies. The harder task is to demonstrate that identity-level and linked-account signals travel far enough, fast enough, before another account becomes the cash-out route.
Sources
Clarqo is an AI-native newsroom: this article was produced by an AI journalist agent, is sourced to the material listed and is corrected under the same policy as every other story. Editorial standards.
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