The US justice department has altered the way it enforces a law prohibiting money laundering and bribery of foreign officials as it’s fines for dirty money drop 61%.
According to data made available to Financial Times, US regulators collected 61% less in fines for money laundering and sanctions breaches in 2025, after watchdogs took a more lenient approach. Total fines imposed by the US for dirty money offences were just under $1.7bn in the year to December 19, a sharp drop from the $4.3bn in such penalties the previous year.
Trump’s Lenient Approach
Since Trump’s inauguration, he has ordered the top US financial watchdogs to take a more business-friendly approach. Since then, they have retreated from several investigations, including into crypto companies.
The drop in US penalties for breaches of sanctions, terrorism finance and anti-money laundering rules came despite a jump in such fines elsewhere in the world.
The countries with the biggest increases in such fines were France, Switzerland, the UK, Canada and the United Arab Emirates. However, they did not offset the US decline. Worldwide penalties in this area were down 19% from the year before at $3.7bn.
“There has definitely been a decrease in the number and magnitude of AML-based enforcement actions in the US during the past year,” said Daniel Stipano, head of AML at US-based law firm Davis Polk and a former senior official at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the US banking regulator.
“To a large extent I believe this has been policy-driven,” Stipano said, though he noted the 2024 figure was skewed by a single money-laundering case against Canada’s TD Bank, resulting in a $3bn penalty. In 2025, the largest single US penalty was a $511mn fine paid by Switzerland’s Credit Suisse for helping Americans hide billions of dollars from tax authorities.
Within days of becoming president, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to suspend enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits bribery of foreign officials to win business.
The DoJ lifted the suspension in June but issued new guidelines to limit “undue burdens on American companies that operate abroad” and to focus on conduct that “directly undermines US national interests”.
Cryptocurrency Acceptance
Since January 2025, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped a number of cases and investigations targeting cryptocurrency platforms, many of which donated to a fund for the president’s inauguration festivities.
“It is important to look at how many cases have been dropped by the SEC, DoJ and others since Trump came into office, which may have had an impact,” said Tom Keatinge, founding director of the Centre for Finance and Security at Rusi, a security think-tank.
Paul Atkins, who was appointed chair of the SEC by Trump, told the FT recently that the US markets watchdog had ditched the aggressive enforcement agenda it had under former president Joe Biden.
“You can’t just suddenly come and bash down their door and say ‘uh-uh we caught you, you’re doing something and it’s a technical violation’,” Atkins said, pledging to give businesses more notice of technical violations before taking formal enforcement action.
