Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency has stood up a dedicated crypto crime unit inside a new command center, targeting money laundering and terror financing as Islamabad expands digital-asset oversight
Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency has formed a specialized cryptocurrency investigation unit aimed at money laundering and terrorism financing conducted through digital assets. The team sits inside the agency's newly launched National Command and Control Centre, known as NC3, which pulls several financial-crime tools into a single operational hub.
The move marks a sharper enforcement turn as Pakistan builds out a formal cryptocurrency framework after years of legal ambiguity. For U.S. investors, exchanges, and compliance teams watching emerging markets, the shift matters because Pakistan ranks among the world's most active crypto-using populations and is now pairing market openings with investigative capacity.
Enforcement Mandate
According to reporting that cited Dr. Muhammad Athar Waheed, director of the FIA's Counter-Terrorism Wing, the new unit is designed for case work rather than market rulemaking. He drew a clear line between the FIA's investigative role and the separate regulatory mission of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, or PVARA.
Waheed also pressed two peer agencies-the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency and the Anti-Narcotics Force-to create comparable crypto-focused teams covering cybercrime and narcotics trafficking. The FIA is drafting procedural rules that would impose fixed deadlines so investigations cannot drag on indefinitely without resolution.
NC3 consolidates Anti-Money Laundering desks, virtual-currency investigation tools, open-source intelligence capacity, cyber patrolling, dark-web monitoring, and an Interpol coordination point. That structure is meant to reduce handoffs that previously slowed complex digital-asset cases spanning wallets, exchanges, and cross-border rails.
Market Opening Push
Pakistan placed third in the Chainalysis 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index, a ranking that has encouraged policymakers to remove barriers rather than rely only on prohibition. Authorities lifted an eight-year ban that had blocked banks from offering crypto-related services, stood up PVARA, and began advancing exchange licensing. Officials have also explored tokenization of state assets as part of a broader digital-finance agenda.
On the international side, Pakistan reached a deal with an affiliate of World Liberty Financial, a venture associated with the Trump family, to pilot the USD1 stablecoin for cross-border payments. The pilot frames stablecoins as a settlement option outside traditional correspondent banking, a theme that U.S. payment firms and compliance officers already track closely when assessing counterparties in high-adoption markets.
Users and institutions evaluating platforms in such markets still need basic operational hygiene. Practical steps for checking withdrawal reliability, account controls, and platform legitimacy are outlined in this guide on how to assess cryptocurrency exchange safety before trading, which remains relevant wherever licensing and enforcement are still maturing.
Religious Law Dispute
Policy momentum hit a notable obstacle in June when the Jamia Darul Uloom Karachi seminary issued a fatwa stating that cryptocurrency does not qualify as wealth under Islamic law and cannot serve as a valid means of payment under those principles. PVARA chairman Bilal bin Saqib responded by engaging the seminary and urging a distinction between purely speculative tokens and asset-backed instruments such as fully reserved stablecoins and blockchain-recorded sukuk.
He argued that Pakistan could compete in Shariah-compliant digital finance if scholars separate speculative products from instruments with clearer underlying claims. Religious authorities have not settled on a single position, leaving a material uncertainty for domestic product design, bank participation, and any stablecoin or tokenized-sukuk plans that depend on local acceptance.
For global markets, the combination of high retail adoption, new licensing machinery, and unresolved religious-legal questions creates a mixed signal: enforcement capacity is rising, but product eligibility and bank distribution may still hinge on interpretations that remain open.
Anti-money-laundering work in crypto typically depends on tracing fund flows across centralized exchanges, self-custodial wallets, mixers, bridges, and stablecoin rails, then matching on-chain patterns to off-chain identity data held by intermediaries. Units like the FIA's new team usually combine blockchain analytics, open-source intelligence, and mutual legal assistance through channels such as Interpol when suspects, servers, or exchange accounts sit outside national borders. Fixed investigation timelines can improve case throughput, but they also raise pressure to prioritize high-value targets and freezeable assets quickly. In markets with strong peer-to-peer usage, investigators often face incomplete KYC coverage, shared devices, and rapid conversion into cash or goods, which can blunt pure on-chain tracing. That is why coordination with narcotics, cybercrime, and banking supervisors tends to matter as much as software tools alone.
