Secret Service Gets New Authority to Fight Money Laundering, FinCEN Gets 10 Years to Share Data

The “Combatting Money Laundering in Cyber Crime Act of 2025” is mostly about tightening the screws on financial crime agencies by adjusting their rules of engagement. If you’re not running an international crime syndicate or a federal agency, this bill mostly affects the administrative plumbing of how the U.S. government hunts down dirty money, especially online. The biggest changes involve expanding the Secret Service's reach and giving federal agencies more time to share financial intelligence.

Expanding the Secret Service’s Beat

Section 2 hands the U.S. Secret Service new investigative authorities, specifically targeting money laundering and structured transactions. Structured transactions are when people break up large sums of money into smaller, less noticeable deposits to avoid federal reporting requirements. Crucially, the bill adds jurisdiction for transactions involving amounts over $871 or $879 related to these crimes. Yes, those are weirdly specific numbers, but they mean the Secret Service can now officially investigate a wider range of financial crimes, specifically those tied to cybercrime and attempts to hide cash. This is the government trying to make sure the Secret Service, known for protecting the President and chasing counterfeiters, is also equipped to deal with digital financial fraud that affects federally insured institutions.

The Long Game: FinCEN’s New Timeline

One of the most interesting procedural changes is found in Section 3, which deals with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). FinCEN is the agency that collects and analyzes data on financial transactions to combat domestic and international money laundering. Previously, they had a five-year limit to exchange certain financial data. This bill doubles that window, changing the deadline to 10 years. On the one hand, this gives FinCEN flexibility in complex, long-running investigations involving cybercrime—which often takes years to track. On the other hand, extending the deadline for sharing crucial intelligence could potentially slow down timely investigations by other agencies that need that data sooner rather than later. It’s a trade-off between thoroughness and speed.

Sanctions Review Gets a Few Extra Months

Section 4 adjusts the timeline for reviewing international financial institutions regarding North Korea sanctions. Under the existing law, the government had six months to review whether an institution was violating sanctions. That review period is now being extended to 10 months. If you run an international bank, you now have to wait four extra months for the U.S. government to complete its review, which is a significant administrative delay. This change suggests that the complexity of tracking international financial flows related to sanctions requires more time than the current six-month window allows.

Checking the Homework on Cyber Crime

Finally, Section 5 mandates that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) complete a study within one year of the bill becoming law. This study must focus on how effective existing anti-money laundering laws—specifically Section 6102 of the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020—are against money laundering that happens through cyber crimes. This is the government essentially checking its own work to see if the current tools are sharp enough to catch digital criminals. For everyone else, this means we should get a report in about a year detailing exactly where the federal government is winning (or losing) the fight against online financial crime.