FCA targets 3 London sites for illegal crypto trading

The FCA announced on Thursday, September 17, 2026, that it had taken enforcement action alongside tax officials and police under anti money laundering and terrorist financing regulations. Cease and desist letters were issued at each of the three unidentified premises, all allegedly operating unregistered crypto businesses. The regulator did not name the specific locations involved.

Why P2P Trading Draws This Kind of Scrutiny

The FCA’s position is straightforward. Unregistered peer to peer crypto traders can be exploited for moving and laundering illicit funds, and there are currently no FCA registered P2P crypto trading businesses operating legally in Britain. Running one without registration is illegal, full stop.

This operation, conducted earlier in September, builds on a similar crackdown in April, when the regulator targeted eight London addresses for the same kind of activity.

The FCA’s Message Was Blunt

Steve Smart, executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, didn’t soften the warning. “Anyone running an unregistered peer to peer crypto business should assume we are looking at them,” Smart said, a line that leaves little room for interpretation about how aggressively the regulator intends to pursue this space.

Crypto assets in Britain remain largely unregulated as investments, treated as high risk with oversight limited mostly to anti money laundering requirements and financial promotion rules. Enforcement actions like this one sit in that gap, targeting the operational side of crypto trading rather than the assets themselves.

A Market With No Legal Operators

What makes this enforcement pattern notable is the baseline it operates against. Not a single P2P crypto trading business currently holds FCA registration in the UK. That means every peer to peer operator in the country is, by definition, operating outside the rules the FCA is enforcing.

The repeated raids point to sustained pressure rather than a one off sweep, with the FCA continuing to focus specifically on unregistered P2P operations as its entry point into broader illicit finance concerns.

Hashlytics Take

The detail that actually matters here isn’t the raid count, it’s the zero. When a regulator says it’s cracking down on unregistered P2P trading in a market where registered P2P trading doesn’t exist, that’s not really enforcement against bad actors specifically. It’s enforcement against an entire business model the FCA hasn’t built a legal pathway for yet. Until that changes, expect these raids to keep happening regardless of who’s actually engaged in wrongdoing versus who’s just operating in the only lane available to them.