Crypto, the State raises its guard: +300% more data requests to Oam from law enforcement agencies and authorities

There is one number that is worth more than a thousand analyses: 202. These are the requests for information on cryptocurrencies that arrived at the OAM - the Body for the Management of Lists of Agents in Financial Activity and Credit Brokers - between 2023 and the first six months of 2026 from the Guardia di Finanza, police forces and supervisory authorities, such as Consob, Banca d'Italia and Ivass. A dizzyingly expanding flow, which tells a precise story: Italia has found a concrete foothold to chase the money running on the blockchain tracks.

This is what emerges from the book 'Cryptocurrencies: demand, supply and regulation', presented by the OAM, the public-law body that, since 2022, by virtue of the Mef Decree, has been managing the Register of Service Providers for the use of virtual currency (Vasp). A register that, in fact, proved to be much more than just a list: a financial intelligence infrastructure at the service of Italian institutions.

Before the Mef Decree of 2022, the cryptocurrency market in Italia was a largely unexplored land in terms of information. No data transmission obligation, no structured census of operators, no institutional channel to intercept anomalies. The Vasp Registry changed the rules of the game.

It was not just a matter of putting names in columns. The OAM has built an information system on cryptocurrencies that collects quarterly granular data on clients' operations: how many there are, where they reside, how much they hold in virtual currency, how many conversion operations they carry out between legal tender and cryptocurrency. A wealth of data that, as the book tells us, has attracted growing and increasingly qualified attention.

The reports on Vasp operators received by OAM - 257 in total between 2023 and 2025 - come from two directions. On the one hand, the supervisory authorities (Bank of Italia, Consob, Ivass), with 75 reports in three years. On the other, private citizens, who alone have sent 182. And here the data becomes interesting: the reports from private individuals are not generic complaints. They concern abusive exercise of crypto activity (16 cases), situations of alleged criminal relevance (57 cases) and transparency problems (107 cases). The Registry, in short, has ended up functioning as a qualified reporting funnel, shunting what deserved investigation towards the competent authorities - going, as the report notes, far beyond the original spirit of the rule.