Firms Closed 238,396 Mule Accounts. Only 15% Were Shared.

British financial firms closed 238,396 accounts they suspected of being money mules last year, and 656,600 over three years. That is from a survey of 35 banks, building societies, challenger banks, payment institutions and e-money institutions published by the Financial Conduct Authority on 23 September.

The same publication shows how few of those closures reach the database other firms can see. In 2025 the surveyed firms made 36,502 filings to the National Fraud Database: 15.3% of the accounts they closed. The other 201,894 closures stayed inside the firm that made them.

The gap is not evenly spread

The filing rate depends on the kind of firm.

Retail banks and building societies accounted for 56.1% of the closures and filed 23,397 cases, about 17.5% of their own closures. Challenger banks accounted for 33% and filed 12,785, about 16.3%.

Payment institutions and e-money institutions are the rest, roughly 10.9% of closures, or about 26,000 accounts. Between them they filed 320 cases: 215 from payment institutions and 105 from e-money institutions. That is a filing rate near 1.2%.

It is an improvement on a low base. In 2023 those firms filed nothing at all.

The FCA is careful about what the comparison means, and so is HaiPay. The bar for filing to the database, run by the fraud prevention service Cifas, is higher than the bar for closing an account: a firm must have reasonable grounds to believe fraud or financial crime was committed or attempted, backed by clear evidence. The regulator says the two numbers are not expected to match. A closure that is never filed is not proof that a firm did anything wrong.

It does mean that the shared record of British mule activity captures about one closure in six, and that the fastest-growing part of the payments industry contributes least to it.

The totals are flattening, the mix is not

Closures rose 28.9% between 2023 and 2025, but almost all of that came in the first year. From 2024 to 2025 the total rose 2.2%, from 233,269 to 238,396.

Underneath, the picture moved. E-money institutions reported 164.6% more closures than in 2024. Retail banks and building societies reported 10.9% fewer. Challenger banks now account for a third of all closures, and for half of all business accounts closed.

The age profile moved too. Customers aged 26 to 39 remain the largest group, at 91,073 closures, with the under-25s close behind at 85,425. But the sharpest increase was among 40 to 49 year olds, up 44.7% in a year to 37,274. Closures of accounts held by under-16s fell 23.4%.

Personal accounts were 93.2% of closures. Charities, non-profits and other legal entities rose 386.7% from 2023, though the FCA notes the volumes stay very small.

Where the money actually leaves

The survey is only half the report. The FCA also ran a working group with 22 firms that traced 140 cases across seven types of fraud, following the largest payments from account to account until the trail ran out.

Two findings matter for anyone building payment controls.

First, cashing out is concentrated early. Funds usually left the mule system between the second and fifth account in the chain, with the heaviest concentration at the second. By then payments have been broken into smaller amounts that look ordinary.

Second, the exit is usually a card. Card payments were the most common cash-out method, used for many low-value transactions or larger payments to local businesses and retailers, which is hard to separate from normal consumer spending. International transfers, with recurring destinations in South Asia, West Africa and the Middle East, and crypto were lower in volume but higher in value.

The report also found accounts that had been used for mule activity more than once, and across different fraud types, before anyone closed them.

How quickly accounts are shut

Nearly half of the accounts closed in 2025, 114,984 of them, had been open less than a year, and 55,353 less than three months.

That varies by firm type in the way the business models predict. E-money institutions closed 74.1% of accounts within six months of opening and payment institutions 56.9%, while retail banks and building societies closed 45.4% of theirs after more than two years.

What this data is not

The figures are what 35 firms reported to their regulator about accounts they suspected, not a count of money mules, and not a court finding about any customer. The FCA says a rise in closures can reflect customer growth and better detection rather than more mules.

The database comparison also has a break in it: Cifas introduced a dedicated money mule filing category in January 2025, so filing numbers before and after are not directly comparable. The share of closures with no recorded gender rose from 24.1% to 30.1%, which limits what the gender split shows.

HaiPay derived the filing rates and the unfiled total from the FCA's own published figures. HaiPay did not contact any firm, the FCA or Cifas.

What to watch

Whether payment and e-money institutions' filings move from hundreds towards the thousands, now that they are closing accounts in the tens of thousands.

Whether the second-account concentration survives contact with better intelligence sharing under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act.

And whether the flattening total is a ceiling on detection or a ceiling on mules.