Three individuals have been convicted of financing terrorism in Indonesian courts during 2024 and 2025, with cryptocurrency intelligence firm Blockchain. TRM Laboratories Confirming that on-chain evidence – wallet addresses, transaction histories, and traced fund flows – served as the prosecution’s anchor in each case, marking what appears to be the first successful use of forensics in Southeast Asia and Indonesia to secure terrorism financing convictions in a national court.
Indonesia’s financial intelligence agency PPATK and its counter-terrorism police unit Densus 88 conducted a joint analysis of the blockchain, submitting the results to courts that accepted the data as central evidence rather than as supplementary background. One of the three defendants was tracked sending more than $49,000 worth of USDT (Tether) stablecoins to a foreign exchange, after which the funds were routed to an ISIS-linked campaign.
image: PPATK
We believe this finding is less a story about Indonesian criminal proceedings than a structural signal about the maturation of on-chain forensics as a tool for the prosecution – one whose evidentiary standards are now being tested and validated in courts beyond the US and European jurisdictions where blockchain analysis companies have historically focused their expert witness activity.
It would be difficult for defense attorneys in similar jurisdictions to argue the admissibility provisions contained in these three convictions.
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Densus 88, PPATK and the ISIS stablecoin trail: How did Indonesia use cryptocurrencies to do it?
The three convictions build on an investigative structure that PPATK and Densus 88 have been putting together since at least 2021, when Indonesia launched its SIPENDAR platform to monitor local cryptocurrency donation flows and require local virtual asset service providers to know your customer and combat money laundering.
Source: Trm Labs
TRM Labs separately identified ISIS-affiliated networks in Indonesia as early as 2023 as active users of USDT encryption on the Tron blockchain for cross-border money movements — a tracking environment that, despite its pseudonymous surface, produces crystal-clear transaction graphs when analytical tools are applied against an exchange’s KYC records obtained via legal proceedings.
The mechanism by which the $49,000 transfer was traced worked as follows: Investigators identified the wallet address associated with the defendant, tracked outgoing transfers to the foreign currency deposit address using on-chain flow analysis, and then linked the exchange-side receipt to account identification data obtained through a mutual legal assistance request or equivalent enforcement channel – producing a documented chain linking an identified individual to a specific terrorist financing recipient.
TRM Labs acted in an analytical capacity, providing the tools and methodology that Densus 88 investigators used to create the map of transactions submitted as evidence to the court. Indonesia’s history of cryptocurrency-related terrorism financing dates back to January 2017, when PPATK first publicly linked ISIS member Bahrun Naim to distributing bitcoin via PayPal to fund local militant groups, and accelerated until 2022 when U.S. Treasury sanctions identified five Indonesians for routing more than $517,000 through local exchanges to ISIS fundraising wallets in Syria — transactions often structured as recurring $10,000 transfers. Disguised as helping humanity.
The 2024-2025 convictions represent the judicial culmination of that investigative lineage, confirming that Indonesian prosecutors have moved from identifying cryptocurrency terrorist financing as a political concern to securing actual criminal convictions based on evidence derived from blockchain technology – a transition period that took nearly seven years from first allegation to first conviction.
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Neil is a professional cryptocurrency content writer with years of experience. He has written for numerous cryptocurrency websites to report breaking news, and has been hired by all kinds of cryptocurrency projects, to create content that will increase their exposure and attract more potential investors.
