Remediation is Not Enough
By Jonathan Brockmeier, Global Chief Compliance Officer, OKX
Our job in compliance is to stop fraud before it leaves our ecosystem, and simple remediation alone cannot solve this problem. For too long, this industry has relied on reacting after the fact. Freezing funds, filing reports, and working with law enforcement all matter, but they happen after the damage is done. When a customer loses money to a scam, the harm is immediate. The gap between the transaction and any recovery is where trust is lost.Crypto scams are adapting faster than ever. AI-powered voice cloning, deepfakes, and increasingly sophisticated social engineering mean that fraud today is harder to detect and more damaging when it lands. Scammers stole an estimated $17 billion in crypto in 2025 alone, and AI-assisted schemes were 4.5 times more profitable than traditional ones.
Prevention must match the scale of the threat
The scale of that threat demands infrastructure. Real-time systems must identify scam destinations before funds leave the platform and operate at the speed modern commerce requires. Compliance cannot move at the pace of paper-based controls when risks materialize in seconds.
This is why we have expanded our proactive fraud prevention capabilities and adopted tooling that detects scam infrastructure at inception, connects those signals to financial identifiers across both crypto and fiat rails, and blocks transfers to active scam accounts in real time. The same systems surface emerging threats for compliance specialists who are trained to identify complex fraud and illicit activity that automated systems alone may miss.
Our Special Investigations and Intelligence team takes that work further. Drawing on decades of experience tracking bad actors and using advanced investigative techniques, the team works closely with law enforcement beyond the transactions that touch OKX directly. It has supported major cases, including assisting US federal authorities in a $2.5 million seizure tied to fentanyl trafficking and helping Bangladesh Police execute the country’s first virtual asset seizure, returning $3.7 million to victims.
Prevention and enforcement work together. Strong front-end controls reduce harm. Effective investigations and cooperation with authorities address what gets through. We stop what we can before funds move and pursue what follows. Neither is optional.
This is ultimately a question of responsibility. Compliance is not just a function or a requirement. It shapes how products are built, how risks are managed, and how a platform earns trust. The industry is moving toward higher standards, and those standards will define who leads.
Remediation will always be necessary. It just cannot be the starting point anymore.
