The biggest single penalty hit $176 million, and MSB revocations jumped from 12 to 82
FINTRAC issued 35 notices of violation worth more than $247 million in 2025-26, and financial entities drew more of them than any other sector.
That is a 52 per cent jump in notices from the year before, when the agency issued 23 worth $25 million, according to “FINTRAC results by the numbers 2025-26,” a corporate report last modified on October 22, 2026.
Financial entities top the scoreboard
Financial entities collected 12 of the 35 notices, more than any other group. Money services businesses (MSBs) came next with eight, while casinos and real estate had five apiece. The report separately counts nine MSBs penalized for more than $198 million combined, for problems including failure to register, reporting failures and gaps in compliance programs.
The five-year trend shows how quickly things have moved. FINTRAC issued 15 notices worth $3.5 million in 2021-22, six worth $1 million in 2022-23, 12 worth $26 million in 2023-24 and 23 worth $25 million in 2024-25.
Examiners kept busy too. FINTRAC ran 625 targeted examinations, 129 of them at financial entities, plus 89 full-scope examinations led by precious metals and stones (34), real estate (29) and mortgage brokers (9). It also processed 812 self-attestations, completed 984 risk questionnaires and received 294 voluntary self-declarations from businesses flagging their own non-compliance.
One crypto case sets a new high
The biggest single penalty landed in October 2025, when FINTRAC imposed $176 million on Xeltox Enterprises Ltd., operating as Cryptomus, an MSB providing virtual currency services to Canadians. The report describes it as the largest penalty in FINTRAC’s history.
Among other violations, the report says, the Centre found that the business “failed to submit suspicious transaction reports where there were reasonable grounds to suspect that they were related to trafficking in child sexual abuse material, fraud, ransomware payments and sanctions evasion.” The report does not include a response from the company.
MSBs drew more than 55 per cent of all assessment activity, a focus the report links to “the sector’s very high vulnerability to money laundering and terrorist financing.” FINTRAC revoked 82 MSB registrations, up from 12 a year earlier. The report also points to September 2025, when the RCMP seized more than $56 million in cryptocurrency, which the report calls the largest crypto seizure in Canadian history. The investigation found that a business involved had failed to register with FINTRAC as an MSB.
Fraud keeps the intelligence teams busy
On the intelligence side, FINTRAC produced 7,214 disclosure packages from 3,007 unique disclosures, its highest annual volume, covering 1.68 million financial transactions. Fraud was the underlying crime, known as the predicate offence, in more than 31 per cent of disclosures.
The report cites a recent Financial Action Task Force evaluation that found law enforcement used FINTRAC’s financial intelligence in 94 per cent of their money laundering and criminal possession investigations. FINTRAC also supported 348 major project-level investigations, sent 38 per cent of its disclosures to partners proactively, and passed 31 cases of non-compliance to law enforcement, 28 of them involving MSBs.
The full text of FINTRAC results by the numbers 2025-26 is available at https://fintrac-canafe.canada.ca/publications/ar/2025-2026-info-eng. For firms wondering what comes next, the report says FINTRAC introduced a new Supervisory Framework aimed at areas of greatest money laundering and terrorist financing risk, and that through oversight, outreach and enforcement, it “worked to improve reporting quality, encourage compliance across regulated sectors, and address emerging risks in Canada’s financial system.”
