An article in the official newspaper of China's top prosecutors' office has laid out a framework for prosecuting crypto money laundering, proposing that courts presume criminal intent when suspects use coin mixers and privacy coins, and that the state build a platform to sell off seized cryptocurrency.

The piece ran in the theory section of the Procuratorate Daily, the newspaper of the Supreme People's Procuratorate, and was written by two district prosecutors in Hunan province and a university law professor. It carries no legal force, but articles like it offer a window into the thinking taking shape inside China's prosecution system, which charged more than 3,000 people with crypto-related money laundering in 2024 alone.

A charging gap

China's dedicated money-laundering offense covers only seven categories of predicate crime, so prosecutors often fall back on a broader "concealment" charge to go after crypto cases, the authors note, a workaround they say has swelled into an overstretched catch-all.

They urge a "double investigation of one case" rule that would screen every underlying crime for laundering and require investigators to map the flow of any crypto involved, building on a 2024 judicial interpretation from China's Supreme People’s Court that already treats using virtual-asset transactions to move criminal proceeds as a form of laundering.

Mixers as a red flag

The boldest proposals concern proof. The authors argue courts should be able to presume a suspect meant to launder money, unless the suspect “provides reasonable counter-evidence,” when they use tools designed to obscure transactions such as mixers or privacy coins, offload large amounts of crypto at “obviously unreasonable” prices, or run high-frequency, large-scale transfers through anonymous wallets with no link to their identity.

They also float a "blockchain data self-verification" principle using on-chain records that can be checked on a public block explorer, with matching hash values, would be treated as presumptively genuine, shifting the burden onto whoever disputes them. Reports from compliant blockchain analytics firms, such as fund flow maps and address clustering, would count as expert evidence, and laundering could be established from circumstantial, fragmentary evidence as long as it forms a coherent chain, even if not every coin is traced to its source.

The seized-coin problem

The third piece addresses what China should do with crypto once it seizes it. Because Beijing bans trading, authorities that confiscate tokens have no clean legal way to cash them out, leaving billions of dollars in limbo.

The article calls for a national platform to custody and dispose of seized crypto through "compliant channels" like directed auctions, a standing expert committee to value holdings against on-chain data and global exchange prices, and cross-border deals plus a blockchain-based "judicial cooperation chain" to trace and recover assets moved offshore. In practice, local governments have already been quietly selling seized crypto through private firms in offshore markets, a workaround Reuters documented last year that a formal system would be meant to replace.

China outlawed crypto trading and mining in 2021, but it remains one of the busiest fronts for crypto-based money laundering. Chinese police have broken up large rings, including a $1.7 billion laundering operation in 2022, while Chinese-language laundering networks processed an estimated $16 billion in 2025 and now handle roughly a fifth of all crypto money laundering worldwide, according to Chainalysis. The firm traces their rise partly to China's own capital controls, as wealthy citizens moving money offshore supply the liquidity that lets the networks launder for Western organized crime groups.

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