Black money rising faster than global GDP; CJI says $4.4 trillion could buy a laptop for every person on Earth

Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s made a stark comparison: if global estimates on money laundering are even roughly right, the money laundered in a single year could buy a modest laptop for every one of the eight billion people on the planet, and still leave some change.

The remark, made at the 43rd International Symposium on Economic Crime in London, puts into perspective the sheer scale of the illicit economy at a time when dirty money flows are growing faster than the global economy.

The value of laundered money flowing through the global system rose to $4.4 trillion in 2025, from $3.1 trillion in 2023. As a share of world GDP, illicit money flows rose to 3.8% from 2.9% over the same period. The value of these flows grew at a 19.2% compound annual growth rate between 2023 and 2025, compared with 5% growth in global GDP.


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That widening gap is central to the challenge facing governments and financial institutions: the pool of illicit wealth is expanding rapidly, while only a tiny fraction of it is ultimately recovered.

CJI Kant said that, by the most generous reckoning, less than one unit in every hundred of illicit wealth is ever recovered. “For every hundred parts of that wealth, 99 are simply referred to in speeches and reports while only one part is ever actually put right,” he said.

Scale of the problem is not limited to money laundering

The global illegal economy spans organised crime, corruption, drug trafficking, human trafficking and terrorist financing. Organised crime and corruption accounted for $2.78 trillion in 2025, growing at a 19.2% CAGR between 2023 and 2025, according to the data in the Nasdaq Verafin Global Financial Crime Report 2026.

Drug trafficking accounted for another $1.07 trillion, with flows growing at 17.1% annually over the period. Human trafficking amounted to $530 billion, growing at 23.5%, while terrorist financing stood at $20 billion, rising at 18.8%.

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The pace of growth is also visible in individual forms of fraud. Credit card and cheque fraud, impersonation, confidence and romance scams, employment fraud, cyber-enabled fraud, advance-fee, lottery, prize and grant fraud, and credit transfers and direct-debit fraud are all growing at around 20% a year, according to the data.

India is seeing the economic crime burden rise too

The number of economic offences registered in the country increased from 156,268 in 2018 to 214,379 in 2024. There was a dip in 2020, when registrations fell to 145,754, but the number has risen steadily since then, reaching 174,013 in 2021, 193,385 in 2022 and 204,973 in 2023.

The financial losses from fraud are rising even as the amount recovered remains a small fraction of what is lost.

Frauds reported in India by banks and financial institutions involved Rs 47,910 crore in FY26, up sharply from Rs 32,043 crore in FY25 and Rs 11,678 crore in FY24. The amount recovered rose to Rs 2,906 crore in FY26, from Rs 1,443 crore in FY25 and Rs 499 crore in FY24.

Yet even with the improvement in recovery, only 6.1% of the amount involved in frauds was recovered in FY26. The recovery share was 4.5% in FY25 and 4.3% in FY24.

The gap between cases and convictions is even more pronounced under India’s anti-money laundering framework.

As many as 4,622 cases were registered by the Enforcement Directorate under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act over the five years from FY22 to FY26. But convictions were secured in only 43 cases, or less than 1% of the cases registered.

The year-wise data shows the scale of the gap. The Enforcement Directorate registered 1,116 PMLA cases in 2021-22, followed by 953 in 2022-23, 698 in 2023-24, 775 in 2024-25 and 1,080 in 2025-26. Convictions were secured in 3, 9, 13, 9 and 9 cases respectively.

The number of accused convicted over the five years stood at 104.

It is against this backdrop that the CJI argued for a proactive response from the judiciary to economic crime. He said India’s modern response to such crime was best understood not as a single statute but as a layered architecture of legislation, institutions and judicial doctrine built over successive decades.

He referred to the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, and the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act, 2018, while acknowledging that these mechanisms were not infallible.

The CJI also pointed to the judiciary’s role in ensuring that enforcement does not come at the cost of due process. He said several individuals had alleged misuse of the PMLA process, including arrests without articulated reasons and custody extending beyond what the facts appeared to justify. In such cases, he said, the judiciary had intervened.

He cited the Supreme Court’s verdict holding that grounds for arrest must be provided to an accused in writing, rather than merely being read aloud, and said the court’s insistence on due process and the presumption of innocence had remained consistent.

The changing nature of fraud is another part of the challenge. The CJI specifically highlighted the growing menace of ‘digital arrest’ scams, in which fraudsters impersonate police officers, judicial officials or bureaucrats over video calls to extract money from victims.

He said the court had directed the Union and state governments to evaluate the extent of the problem and called for the establishment of a distinct offence with penalties proportionate to the harm inflicted.

For CJI Kant, this is an example of the judiciary responding to emerging forms of economic crime rather than waiting for Parliament to legislate specifically on every new fraud.

The challenge, however, increasingly extends beyond national borders.

Black money, by its nature, does not remain confined to the country where the underlying crime took place. CJI Kant said India had learned through experience that Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties, despite imperfections in their machinery and modalities, brought recovered assets home more reliably than extradition.

The message was therefore broader than the scale of money laundering itself. As illicit money flows grow faster than the world economy, the challenge is not simply to identify dirty money, but to trace it across borders, recover it and ensure that enforcement keeps pace with increasingly sophisticated forms of economic crime.

As CJI Surya Kant put it, the nature of illicit wealth means it rarely stays where it was stolen.