Pakistan crypto investigation unit targets digital-asset crime

Pakistan created a dedicated crypto-crime unit inside the Federal Investigation Agency on Wednesday to investigate money laundering, terror financing and cybercrime tied to digital assets, Dawn reported. The team gives authorities a specialist enforcement arm just as the country tries to pull crypto services into a formal market.

The enforcement push sits beside Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority licensing rules, which require virtual-asset service providers to pass fit-and-proper checks, anti-money-laundering controls and governance standards. That leaves the sector with two gates: PVARA decides who can operate, and the FIA is being equipped to examine how digital assets are used after money starts moving through the system.

That split is the point of the policy shift. Pakistan is not only writing rules for exchanges; it is building a desk meant to test whether those rules work after suspicious money moves.

PVARA’s advisory on virtual-asset announcements and activities says the regulator aims to decide complete no-objection-certificate applications within 60 calendar days and can act against unlicensed offerings. For exchanges and wallets, the FIA desk raises the operating cost in plain terms. Customer onboarding, transaction monitoring and suspicious-activity reporting now sit closer to criminal enforcement. A licence may get a firm into the market. It will not by itself answer whether compliance files hold up when a suspicious transfer becomes a case.

Dawn said the unit sits inside the agency’s National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency and will probe money laundering, terror financing and online fraud involving tokens and other digital assets. Muhammad Athar Waheed, director of the FIA’s Counter-Terrorism Wing, said the agency expected more reform projects to be completed over the next six months. The placement pushes crypto oversight toward an investigative and counter-terrorism structure, rather than a narrow fintech-policy lane.

The step follows Pakistan’s shift from banking exclusion toward supervised integration. Reuters reported in April that the State Bank of Pakistan had opened formal banking channels to licensed virtual-asset service providers, reversing a 2018 ban on bank accounts for the sector. Bilal bin Saqib, chief executive of PVARA, told Reuters that bringing licensed operators into the banking system was “a foundational step” toward putting virtual assets inside formal finance. Banking access gave compliant firms a route onshore. The new FIA unit says that access will come with formal scrutiny.

The market-access backdrop had already changed. Reuters reported in December that Pakistan allowed Binance and HTX to begin exploring exchange licences and the tokenisation of up to $2 billion of state-owned and private assets. Licensing was the growth story then. The narrower question now is whether the same systems can survive both a licensing review and a criminal probe.

For regional policymakers, Pakistan’s structure stands out because it separates market entry from law-enforcement follow-through. Several emerging markets are trying to keep crypto demand onshore while watching cross-border flows, offshore venues and peer-to-peer activity more closely. Pakistan’s answer, at least on paper, is licensed activity inside the perimeter and a specialist unit for misuse around it. For policymakers, that is the trade: more visibility and a cleaner audit trail, not less crypto. That model could appeal to governments that want exchange activity visible without treating every token transaction as legitimate by default.

The setup is not a broad ban on digital assets. It points the other way. Pakistan wants licensed activity inside the formal system, with clearer surveillance around who uses the rails and why. Record-keeping, customer due diligence and cross-border tracing are likely to become flashpoints if the unit starts bringing cases. The first pressure will fall on exchanges, wallet providers and payments groups that treated Pakistan as an adoption story before enforcement caught up.