This autumn, his sentencing is expected to be handed down by a US judge. For both counts, he could spend up to 15 years behind bars. According to the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon, Vardanyan admitted to conspiracy and computer fraud. Every count has a maximum of its own. Conspiracy carries a five-year sentence; computer fraud carries a ten-year sentence. A $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release are also associated with each.

Ryuk Ransomware operator could spend up to 15 years in prison

In February 2024, he was charged with a third count of extortion by a federal grand jury in Portland. That one was not resolved by the plea. According to the prosecution, the scheme operated from November 2019 to April 2020. After breaking into corporate networks, Vardanyan and his accomplices used Ryuk. Ryuk is a type of malware that locks down and encrypts a victim’s files until a ransom is paid.

The group allegedly installed the software on hundreds of workstations and servers, according to investigators. It then left ransom notes, each requesting an email address and bitcoin so that victims could negotiate their way back into their own systems. The DOJ stated in a press release on July 9 that “a ransom note was placed on the computer systems demanding ransom payments in Bitcoin, a form of cryptocurrency, and provided an email address that victims could use to communicate with the cybercriminals.”

The wallet was under the group’s control. The attackers gave the victim the decryption keys after the victim paid into it. According to prosecutors, a Michigan company paid 200 bitcoin to regain access to its network. At the time, the bitcoin was worth over $1.1 million. A Wilsonville, Oregon, technology company was also targeted by the campaign. And in February 2020, it struck a Texas school. According to the DOJ, the operation received ~1,610 bitcoin in total, which was worth more than $15 million at the time of the payments.

A complete list of victims has not been released by the prosecution. Additionally, there is no wallet history or breakdown of which payments originated from which attack. Vardanyan consented to make restitution totaling more than $1.1 million as part of his plea. Portland will host a US District Judge review on September 22, 2026. The restitution amount, the plea deal, and federal sentencing guidelines will all be taken into consideration by the court.

The FBI investigated. Assistant US Attorney Katherine A. Rykken is prosecuting, and US Attorney Scott E. Bradford announced the plea. The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs helped secure Vardanyan’s arrest and extradition from Ukraine. And the US Attorney’s Office credited Ukrainian authorities for their help. Cryptopolitan recently reported on a separate operation. Attackers used a fake Polymarket trading bot to push credential-stealing malware to more than 50 developers.

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Senior CA Ashok Vijayvargiya is the victim. Additionally, he serves as the Chief Returning Officer of the Madhya Pradesh Chamber of Commerce. “Hello, this is Divya,” the scam’s opening message said, according to the paper. A slow-build confidence trick followed. He saw early gains on his cryptocurrency holdings from scammers. His investment increased steadily as a result of those seeming profits, reaching over $2.2 million. The money only went in one direction.

Indian senior loses funds in crypto trading scam

The operators kept coming up with excuses to withhold the payout when Vijayvargiya attempted to withdraw his money. The returns on his screen were never real, he realized. The State Cyber Cell of Madhya Pradesh filed a case against anonymous suspects. The DSP in charge of the cell is Sanjeev Nayan Sharma. According to the Free Press Journal, he stated that investigators are conducting technical tracing of 20 bank accounts, three WhatsApp numbers, and the URL of the fake trading portal.

Before the operators proceed, the team wants to follow the IP trail and freeze the associated accounts. Divyesh Patel, a 29-year-old software engineer, was detained by the City Cyber Crime Cell in Surat, Gujarat. A complainant in the online investment scam lost over ₹72.73 lakh, or about $76,000, after being tricked into trading cryptocurrencies via Telegram. The victim was led to a fraudulent trading website and promised enormous profits, just like in Gwalior. After that, the funds disappeared into a series of other accounts.

According to the police, ₹17 lakh or about $17,700 of the victim’s money ended up in Patel’s IDBI Bank account. In exchange for a 2% cut on the transactions, he allegedly rented out his banking account to a fugitive accomplice. The same account has already appeared in eight cyber fraud complaints from various states, investigators told IANS. This is connected to ₹24.72 crore or about $2.5 million in alleged fraud.

Patel was charged by Surat police under Section 66(D) of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008, and several sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. According to Cryptopolitan, the Enforcement Directorate detained Bengaluru hacker Srikrishna, also known as Sriki, in May in connection with a Bitcoin theft case valued at roughly ₹11.5 crore, or $1.3 million. According to Cryptopolitan’s coverage of that report, the FBI recorded $11.4 billion in cryptocurrency losses in the US in 2025, a 22% increase over the previous year.

The arrest was accompanied by a warning from the Surat Cyber Crime Cell. Police advised people to confirm any unsolicited offers related to cryptocurrency, stock trading, or forex. They advised leaving and blocking unfamiliar Telegram or WhatsApp groups and viewing modest early returns as bait. Additionally, they advised people to report suspected fraud immediately through the cybercrime helpline and cautioned against sending money to strangers they met on social media or marriage websites.

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Instead, Ripple spent the next four years in court and about $150 million on lawyers. Its US business stalled for about five years, as the SEC also targeted Brad over XRP he sold. Regulators offered to drop his case for a fine while continuing against Ripple, but Garlinghouse refused. He noted that XRP transactions usually settle in about four seconds and cost a fraction of one cent. Ripple sells software to banks and financial institutions, not individual users. Garlinghouse also compared XRP with Bitcoin, noting that one BTC transaction can cost around $10 and take about 10 minutes.

Ripple CEO rips into Gary Gensler-led SEC

In the interview, the Ripple CEO also mentioned that XRP serves another purpose. It handles payments faster, charges less, and supports more activity. Ripple uses the open-source XRP Ledger in its products. Asked why the SEC (specifically under Gary Gensler and Joe Biden) was angry, he joked, “They’re jerks.” He said the issue was applying old financial laws to new technology. Garlinghouse entered the internet industry in 1994, pointing to rules passed in 1996, with help from Al Gore.

He mentioned that the rules gave internet companies and investors clearer legal boundaries. According to Brad, the crypto companies had been asking for similar laws since most members of the industry were ready to comply but required clear limits. The SEC insisted that XRP was a security and not a currency or commodity. Brad noted that a security tends to give its holder rights within the business entity. XRP buyers received no Ripple shares, votes, board powers, or dividends. Ripple remains private. It raised venture capital in 2012, 2015, and 2016 by selling actual equity.

Garlinghouse also compared that equity with owning Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) stock. Ripple owns substantial XRP, but Brad said it cannot command the network because the code is open source. He placed XRP closer to Bitcoin than corporate equity. The SEC said Ripple sold unregistered securities. Brad said the matter was civil, not criminal, though the possible penalty was enormous. In his visits to the SEC office in 2017, 2018, and 2019, Garlinghouse did not have legal representation.

A Harvard Business School alumnus, he never treated XRP as a security but only explained the Ripple system to the SEC office personnel. “Not once did someone say to me, Brad, we think XRP might be a security,” he said. When the agency later sued both him and Ripple, Brad questioned whether its theory meant every XRP holder who sold tokens had also broken securities law.

He said the personal charge was meant to pressure him. Brad called the SEC’s conduct “distasteful” and “maybe unethical.” Ripple repeatedly asked for clear guidance, yet regulators gave none before suing. Ripple won after four years. Trump later appointed a new chair who adopted a different approach and engaged crypto companies directly during the final years of the fight.

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Although the team blamed “large market participants,” Zach connected the selling wallet to an older group of tokens that had been distributed by the project. The wallet holds 81.5 million LAB. Zach traced its activity back to April 2026 and connected it with his May report on private lending, discounted sales, supply control, changed lockups, and unusual market-maker activity. Zach said the entity received more than 196 million LAB from the project in April. On April 8, it sent 100 million LAB into two Bitget accounts.

The deposit addresses were 0xe39f91a0daffc5547ada79a09be30b8556f7dfba and 0x77156a0a621d2ac7a075c0ac3172707c2e4aa191. A second batch followed from April 23 through April 25. The entity placed another 96 million LAB into two different Bitget addresses: 0x6593aa6c31c88397c37f71259625ec92fe4ee0bf and 0xdd77bfbdc11cd37fd255ae35a4ac39df1f9d570a. Some 100 million LAB were moved out of Bitget between May 11 and May 12 into ten wallets.

ZachXBT traced the LAB token sales to an insider-funded wallet

According to ZachXBT, the trading history from that period does not show any external party building such a big stake. He thus concluded that both transactions belong to one party. From July 10 through July 11, the holder began sending LAB to three Aster accounts: 0xaad30cab22f772c1658b7845b5837d35bf3a467a, 0x76ccfde9819500204985580d235dd8326fa0b241, and 0x628dd74f428a81cd34ece11331a7f1593f76047a. Zach said spot sales on the decentralized exchange pushed the price down another 54%.

His Telegram warning said the wallet was “initially funded by the LAB team” before it placed the 18.4 million tokens on Aster. “It is disappointing no action was taken by Bitget, Binance, or Gate for allowing blatant market manipulation on tokens against users,” said ZachXBT. ZachXBT’s May report said LAB reached a $6 billion fully diluted value while data still gave no firm answer on the circulating supply. CoinGecko, RootData, and CoinMarketCap showed different figures, and the project’s papers did not explain how tokens were divided.

In addition, his wallet review placed more than 95% of LAB under insider control. Vova Sadkov and Mark created LAB as a trading platform and held its token launch in October 2025. Their earlier project, Eesee, used the token symbol ESE. Some investors said the founders left that project behind when they started working on LAB. The listed backers were Lemniscap, OKX, Animoca Brands, GSR, Gate, KuCoin, Mirana, and Amber Group. Several also ran trading venues where LAB was available. The report said the team changed Legion sale terms without a vote.

Buyers had a three-month waiting period, but an email shared by one participant showed that period had become nine months. Content creators also said they had waited for months for campaign payments and received no clear answer. One private contract offered 7.5% interest each month for six months. The borrower was The Lab Management Ltd., a British Virgin Islands company, and Vladimir Sadkov signed as director. If the firm failed to repay, the agreement allowed payment in LAB at the market price.

The borrower wallet, shortened as 0xf09c, was also used for public LAB buybacks. Zach linked it to 0x3185, an address tied to a Wildcat loan. He said LAB funds reached exchange accounts allegedly belonging to Vova. Those accounts had also received Eesee-related deposits before LAB existed and were tied to his ENS name and NFT collection. Private offers had circulated since January 2026. Mark looked for OTC buyers in a public Telegram chat.

Other buyers received WhatsApp terms that included loans at 5% a month, LAB at a 60% discount with a five-month lock, a 25% monthly reset discount, and another block sold 20% below market. A KOL Capital offer cut the price by 80%. Half the tokens were due on August 14 and the rest on September 15. Buyers had to post support several times before receiving the tokens or face a blacklist. Zach said these deals created token releases that ordinary buyers could not see, while deeper discounts appeared as LAB climbed.

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The plaintiffs, led by a person called Noah Doe, are using New York’s lost-and-found law, Article 7-B of the Personal Property Law, to get a judge to declare them the owners of roughly 39,000 wallets that haven’t moved funds in years. The Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) announced through a post on X that it filed to intervene as a defendant in a case concerning 3.7 million bitcoin. This includes about 1.10 million BTC from Satoshi-era addresses and nearly 80,000 BTC tied to the 2011 Mt. Gox hack.

Bitcoin Policy Institute intervenes as a defendant in the case

The plaintiffs argue that they “found” dormant wallet addresses, reported them to the NYPD, sent on-chain messages using Bitcoin’s OP_RETURN field to try to contact owners, waited 90 days, and then asked a court to declare the wallets abandoned. The Bitcoin Policy Institute, represented by the law firm White & Case, has submitted a proposed answer, 15 affirmative defenses, and plans to file a motion to dismiss.

The case has since been paused by Judge Kathy J. King until a hearing on July 14. Two amicus briefs have already been filed against the plaintiffs’ claims, one from attorney Ian Cohen and another from the Digital Chamber, a blockchain trade group. Galaxy Research valued the targeted coins at nearly $274 billion in late May. However, the plaintiffs may never get to receive that money as analysts have flagged their claim as unenforceable.

Cryptopolitan reported back in May that Bitcoin has no mechanism to reassign funds without a wallet’s private key. The plaintiffs have admitted that they don’t have these keys. Galaxy Research Director Alex Thorn noted that the plaintiffs had already dropped 44 addresses from the case after those wallets moved coins following the lawsuit’s filing. This alone disproves the claim that these wallets are truly abandoned.

Before the Bitcoin Policy Institute intervened to kill the case, a pseudonymous defendant calling himself John Doe 33 filed a verified answer and affirmative defenses on July 8, appearing pro se and saying his portfolio topped $80 billion when the case was filed. John Doe 33 argues that public Bitcoin addresses are not legal persons and cannot be sued. The plaintiffs simply copied public address data onto a USB drive, and that does not amount to finding or possessing anyone’s coins.

He went on to point out that OP_RETURN messages are a poor method of notice because many wallets never display them, and cold-storage users have no reason to check. He also alleges that an identified owner had already contacted plaintiffs’ counsel by phone, disproving the claim that owners were unknown and unreachable. Two amicus briefs also preceded the institute’s move.

Attorney Ian Cohen filed the first on May 29, arguing the dormant coins cannot be treated as lost or abandoned property under New York law, as that only applies to physical objects like jewelry or cash. The blockchain trade group Digital Chamber filed the second on July 7 with help from consulting firm CahillNXT and Brown Rudnick attorney Stephen Palley.

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The attacker, according to Specter, had bridged the proceeds to Ethereum using LayerZero and was converting Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) into Ether (ETH). Blockchain security firm PeckShieldAlert then corroborated Specter’s account and added more detail, stating that $5.25 million had already been moved from Hedera Mainnet to Ethereum. The attacker’s starting funds were traced to 1 ETH withdrawn from Tornado Cash, and the wallet now holds around 2,360 ETH, which PeckShieldAlert put at $4.25 million, and 15.58 WBTC, which is valued at around $1 million.

Hacker moves more than $5M from Heredera within hours

According to the report, a third account, from onchain observer @0xNox, also reported that over $4 million had been bridged to Ethereum through LayerZero, with the funds cycling through WBTC-to-ETH swaps. Hedera does not use a conventional blockchain. Instead, it runs on a hashgraph consensus system built by the network’s founders, Dr. Leemon Baird and Mance Harmon, and its native token HBAR pays for transactions and secures the network through staking.

That architecture has drawn criticism over how difficult it is to audit. Responding to Specter’s thread, investigator ZachXBT wrote that “Hedera is basically a privacy chain because its block explorer is so bad,” a jab at how difficult the network is to trace during an incident like this one. Hedera is governed by a council of large enterprises, and it has spent 2026 recruiting brand-name members.

McLaren Racing joined the Hedera Council in March, and Accenture joined in April, with both organizations citing the network’s governance model and enterprise focus as part of their reasons for joining. On its X account bio, it has written, “The world’s leading Fortune 1,000 organizations choose Hedera as the trust layer of the digital economy.” With such clientele and positioning, a theft that was discovered on-chain while it was happening still hit the platform, posing questions to its security narrative.

Hedera has not made any statement regarding the exploit, but users and industry observers will be looking forward to it and the overall post-mortem. HBAR currently trades around $0.068 as of the time of reporting, a decline of about 4% in the past 24 hours. It has a market capitalization of around $2.98 billion, having declined by over 3.9% in 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.

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Features like the infinite scroll, video autoplay, push notifications, and the platforms’ personalized recommender systems are being pointed out as part of the core problem. According to the Commission, these features “shift the brain into autopilot mode,” and it says that Meta failed to properly weigh their effect on users’ physical and mental health. However, a Meta spokesperson has stated that the company does not disagree with the regulators’ findings, including the conclusions about its teen accounts. The spokesperson also stated that Meta would keep working with the Commission on child safety.

Meta rejects European Commission’s findings on its platform designs

Meta has previously stated that it has put in more than a decade of work and built over 50 tools to protect younger users. The investigation was started in May 2024 and focused on minors and vulnerable adults. The Commission found that Meta ignored what it knew about how long children stay on the apps late at night and about how formats like Reels and Stories can drive what it calls an “excessive or even compulsive use.” The regulator added that the fixes Meta claims to have put in place did not hold up under review.

It also states that features such as time-management tools, parental controls, and screen-time awareness pages are too weak to offset features engineered for engagement. A senior Commission official told journalists that the teen accounts Meta rolled out in the EU in 2024 did not meet the standard set by the DSA. The official also added that their default settings “can be easily dismissed” and that parents need to be experts to locate the controls at all.

Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s Executive Vice President for Tech Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy, said, “The Digital Services Act provides a clear framework to hold platforms accountable for the addictive design and effects of their services,” adding, “We are fully committed to enforcing our legislation in Europe.” The preliminary findings don’t mean the EU has made a decision or issued any penalty yet.

Meta, on the other hand, can respond in writing, examine the Commission’s files, and try to refute the case before any penalty is set. If the finding is confirmed, Meta could face fines of up to 6% of its total annual worldwide revenue, alongside orders to change the products. The Commission wants autoplay and infinite scroll switched off by default, and screen breaks added. It also recommends that Meta rework its algorithm to serve less personalized content.

In April, the Commission said the company was failing to keep under-13s off Facebook and Instagram, and in October 2025, it accused Meta and TikTok of blocking researcher access to platform data. TikTok was separately found to be unlawfully addictive in February 2026. Also, an expert panel convened by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is expected to present recommendations on social media limits for children by July 17. At least 10 member states, including France, Italy, and Spain, are already drafting their own rules.

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The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) gave its final approval to Circle, allowing the company to run a national trust bank carrying the legal name First National Digital Currency Bank, N.A. The regulator first gave a conditional go-ahead in December of 2025. This move brings USDC custody under direct federal supervision for the first time. The new entity will do business as Circle National Trust, according to Circle’s announcement. The bank will only handle custody of digital assets for Circle and its affiliates, and it will not take deposits or make consumer loans the way a commercial bank does.

Circle receives final approval from the OCC

According to reports, Circle’s business plan includes provisions to extend custody later to a limited set of institutional clients such as banks and regulated derivatives firms, but only “depending on demand.” Circle’s USDC is backed by cash and short-term US government securities, which are currently in the custody of Circle’s existing regulated entities. Moving them under the trust bank would put reserve management under federal oversight, but Circle has not said when, or whether, it will take that step.

Jeremy Allaire, Circle’s co-founder, chairman and CEO, said federal supervision gives financial institutions “clarity and confidence” to build on public blockchains. New services that Circle intends to offer will be subject to further regulatory approvals and operational work before they can go live. Following the news of the OCC approval, Circle’s stock shot up as much as 15% pre-market. Cryptopolitan reported that apart from Circle, the OCC handed conditional charters to five crypto firms in December 2025, including Ripple, Paxos, BitGo and Fidelity Digital Assets.

Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould stated that the new entrants are a benefit as they “provide access to new products, services and sources of credit to consumers.” The Bank Policy Institute (BPI) is considering taking legal action against the OCC. It argues that crypto trust banks could offer bank-like products without carrying the same obligations as full-service lenders. Other banking groups have also asked the regulator to narrow the policy, citing financial stability and consumer protection.

Despite this pushback, Nomura’s Laser Digital and Sony Bank’s Connectia Trust have since secured conditional approvals of their own. The OCC’s public docket shows that there are pending applications from firms including Morgan Stanley’s digital trust arm and Revolut’s US bank.

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The operation, known as First Light 2026, ran from January 15 to April 30, according to INTERPOL’s statement. Its focus was social engineering, the practice of exploiting a person’s trust to extract money or account details. That category covers business email compromise, sextortion, romance, impersonation, and investment scams, along with the laundering networks that move the proceeds. INTERPOL counted more than 142,000 victims over the four months. Alongside the arrests, police blocked 31,014 bank accounts, solved 23,715 cases, identified another 15,606 suspects, and issued 99 notices and diffusions, the agency reported.

INTERPOL sheds light on its months-long operation

According to INTERPOL, to intercept money before it vanished, authorities leaned on I-GRIP, INTERPOL’s stop-payment tool that can freeze both fiat and virtual asset transfers. Crypto was at the crime scene in Thailand, where the police arrested two suspects tied to a laundering operation that fed romance-scam money into several cryptocurrencies, then used cross-chain swaps to break the trail between blockchains. One suspect, aged 20, ran a wallet that moved more than $122.5 million in ten months, according to investigators.

Crypto was also involved in other legs of the operation, one of which was in Palau, where authorities deported 22 people accused of running scam centers out of hotels, using crypto and illegal gambling sites to reach victims abroad. INTERPOL’s financial crime chief sees the pattern as a fixed feature of the trade. “Criminal syndicates exploit human psychology to manipulate their targets, and no nation can stay safe unless all countries are equipped and committed to jointly fighting back,” said Tomonobu Kaya, director of the INTERPOL Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre, in the statement.

On the African continent, INTERPOL has also been active in dismantling criminal elements engaged in illicit activities that are linked to crypto. It partnered with Binance and AFRIPOL to recover $4.3 million and make over 651 arrests in an operation that spanned late 2025 to January 2026. The schemes were of varying kinds, ranging from a fake police station to a blocked wire, and not every scheme relied on tokens. Police in Eswatini arrested 82 people and seized 240 electronic devices after breaking up a network that ran illegal gambling, laundering, and impersonation scams.

The group had built a working replica of a Brazilian police station, with fake uniforms and signage, and posed as federal police on video calls to convince victims they were under investigation and should move money for “safekeeping,” according to INTERPOL. Due to the volume of digital evidence, the agency deployed a support team to help with forensics. There were cases where authorities were able to stop money mid-flight. Authorities in Singapore and Oman worked together using I-GRIP to block a $6.6 million transfer linked to a business email compromise scam aimed at a Singapore commodity trading firm.

Another one occurred in Macao, where an anti-fraud outreach campaign found a resident who was being manipulated by scammers posing as public officials. The police stepped in before the victim lost close to $372,000. INTERPOL’s June 2024 operation, which covered 61 countries, seized $257 million and arrested 3,950 suspects. First Light has run since 2014 and is funded by China’s Ministry of Public Security, with support from regional policing bodies ASEANAPOL, GCCPOL, and Europol.

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Former MEP and Pirate Party privacy campaigner Patrick Breyer revealed that during the recent European Parliament vote, 314 members voted against the EU’s chat control rules while 276 backed it. There were 17 abstentions, and because rejecting the measure needed an absolute majority of the full chamber rather than a simple majority of those present, the 314 opposing votes were not enough. A separate amendment to limit message scanning to suspects flagged by courts also drew more support than opposition, 322 to 255, and similarly the majority lost.

European Union Parliament falls short of needed votes

Due to the outcome of the vote, “Chat Control 1.0,” which was temporarily paused after European Union institutions could not agree to extend it, will now be revived. It is a temporary exception that lets U.S. tech firms scan direct messages on services such as Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Gmail and iCloud without a warrant or prior suspicion. The proposal was brought back for a vote by the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP).

Parliament President Roberta Metsola, who is an EPP member, asked EU leaders to restart discussions at the last European Council meeting. Four European commissioners also wrote to MEPs, urging them to pass the proposal. Metsola’s office said she was following a decision made by group leaders, but several lawmakers who worked on the issue said they were not told about this in advance. Simeon de Brouwer from the digital rights group EDRi told Euractiv that the Parliament had been “backstabbed by its own president.”

Rand Hammoud from the Centre for Democracy and Technology Europe said that using the largest political group’s power to force a new vote on a measure that had already failed “should concern anyone who cares about institutional integrity.” Privacy advocates like Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin have also campaigned against the measure. “Fight Chat Control. You cannot make society secure by making people insecure,” Buterin wrote on X in September 2025. He argued that backdoors into private communication are “inevitably hackable.”

NFT collector and free-speech advocate 6529 amplified a Buterin post opposing the renewed push on July 8. Notably, a 2024 draft leaked to French outlet Contexte and flagged by Breyer showed EU interior ministers seeking to exempt the professional accounts of police, military and intelligence staff from the same scanning they wanted to impose on the public. Buterin says that is evidence that officials know the tools are unreliable.

Why do platforms scan messages?

The regulation, formally the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, was proposed by then-Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson in May 2022. Supporters, including the Commission’s own home affairs directorate, argue that voluntary detection by platforms leaves gaps and that the EU relies too heavily on the United States to flag abuse happening inside the bloc. Opponents counter that scanning everyone’s messages amounts to mass surveillance.

The Council of the EU’s own legal service has warned that the approach conflicts with the right to privacy, and a European Parliament study concluded there is no way to detect abuse material at scale without a high rate of false positives. Breyer cited German federal police figures showing that 48% of alerts are not criminally relevant in the first place, and pointed to EU Commission data indicating scanning of private chats produced only 36% of abuse reports in 2024.

Breyer called the result “a farce” that “damages democracy,” but said the fight over a permanent version was “just getting started.” A symbolic carve-out was added for encrypted chats, though, as Breyer noted, services like WhatsApp were never scanned to begin with. Talks on the permanent framework, called Chat Control 2.0, resume in September.

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