• The FCA, HM Revenue & Customs and the Metropolitan Police visited three London premises suspected of illegal peer-to-peer crypto trading, and issued cease and desist letters at all three.
  • No arrests or charges were announced. The regulator’s notice describes the activity as suspected, and gives no figures for how much crypto was changing hands.
  • No peer-to-peer crypto business is registered with the FCA anywhere in the UK, which means every one of them is trading outside the money laundering regime.

Buying crypto from a person rather than a platform is not, in itself, an offence for the buyer. Running that swap as a business in the UK without registering is. The Financial Conduct Authority says three London premises have now been told to stop.

Cash-for-crypto dealers exist because they are fast and they ask very little. That is the whole appeal, and it is also the risk. If money you hand over or receive is later traced to crime, your bank can freeze or close your account, and you can be asked to prove where the funds came from months after the trade.

There is no compensation scheme behind any of this. A dealer who disappears takes your money with them, and because none of these businesses are registered, there is nobody to complain to.

What peer-to-peer trading means in practice

Red taxi drives past shops on city street
Shopfronts on a London high street, the kind of setting where small currency and crypto exchange operations trade face to face with walk-in customers. Photo by Zhen Yao on Unsplash.

There is no app and no order book. You message a dealer, or walk into a premises, hand over cash or make a bank transfer, and the coins arrive in your wallet a few minutes later. The rate is negotiated between two people. Identity checks range from light to none at all.

That is legal to do as an individual. Doing it by way of business is where the law bites. Under the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017, a firm carrying on cryptoasset exchange activity in the UK has to be registered with the FCA, which brings with it customer identity checks, record keeping and an obligation to report suspicious transactions.

Here is the detail that tells you most about the sector: the FCA says there are currently no registered peer-to-peer crypto businesses operating in the UK. Not a few. None. So any premises running one is, by definition, outside the regime.

What the operation did, and what it didn’t

The FCA says the action took place on 10 September 2026, alongside HMRC and the Met, across multiple London locations. Cease and desist letters were issued at all three premises, requiring the traders to stop any suspected illegal crypto business. It follows a similar FCA-led operation in April, and the regulator says evidence gathered then is now supporting criminal investigations and further enforcement.

Steve Smart, the FCA’s executive director of enforcement and market oversight, said in the press release: “Working with partners, we continue to track and disrupt illegal crypto activity. Anyone running an unregistered peer-to-peer crypto business should assume we are looking at them.”

That is deterrence messaging, and it should be read as such rather than as a description of what happened at these three addresses. A cease and desist letter is an instruction, not a finding. Nothing in the notice says illegal activity was proven at any of the premises, no arrests or charges were announced, no value of trading or seized funds is given, and there is no confirmation that the trading has actually stopped.

The FCA does have results to point at, and it points at them here: an unlawful crypto ATM network operator sentenced to four years, and support for the arrest of two people suspected of running an illegal exchange. Both are separate, previously concluded matters included as background. Neither came out of this operation.

Detective Sergeant Sathish Alalasundaram of the Metropolitan Police, quoted in the same release, was franker about the difficulty: “The complex nature of cryptocurrency, combined with the speed at which funds can be moved across jurisdictions, presents ongoing challenges for those investigating.”

The bit that lands on ordinary buyers

The FCA’s case against unregistered dealers is that they give criminals a route to move and launder money, because they sit outside the controls designed to spot it. Read that as a general risk statement rather than an allegation about these three premises, because that is how the regulator has worded it.

For a buyer, though, the practical consequence is the same either way. Sterling that passes through a dealer’s account and into yours can carry a history you know nothing about, and UK banks act on that history without much ceremony. An account frozen while the bank investigates is a common outcome, and it is a slow, documentation-heavy thing to unpick. Our guide to crypto and UK bank accounts covers what banks tend to ask for.

Checking a firm takes about a minute. The FCA register lists every authorised and registered firm, and the regulator also publishes a warning list of unregistered ones. On the peer-to-peer question specifically, the search is already answered: nothing is registered, so nothing will come up.

What to watch

Whether any of these three premises resurface in an enforcement notice with a name and a charge attached. Letters cost nothing to ignore, and the April operation is the test case for whether this approach eventually produces prosecutions.

The other thing is the calendar. The UK’s full cryptoasset regime comes into force on 25 October 2027, and the FCA has begun publishing guidance on which activities will need authorisation. Until then, crypto here stays largely unregulated apart from money laundering and financial promotion rules. We track the build-up on our policy page.