Spencer Woodman

Spencer Woodman tracks how opaque financial systems - especially cryptocurrencies and offshore structures - enable crime and shield wealth from scrutiny, reporting for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. His current work centres on the crypto ecosystem, focusing on stablecoins, exchanges and the difficulties law enforcement faces when trying to recover stolen or laundered funds. His investigations often sit inside large, collaborative projects and have run in major outlets alongside ICIJ reporting, including newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Rolling Stone and The Intercept.

Crypto crime and the Coin Laundry project

Woodman’s recent crypto reporting examines how stablecoins and other digital assets have become infrastructure for scams and money laundering, and how that infrastructure resists traditional law enforcement tools. In his investigation into Circle, a major stablecoin issuer, he reports that prosecutors in Wisconsin filed a criminal complaint alleging the company refused to comply with a warrant ordering it to help recover a scam victim’s stolen USDC, despite having previously frozen the funds. He details how prosecutors and police in multiple jurisdictions say Circle denied requests to freeze or return stolen funds, even when court orders were obtained, highlighting a gap between legal expectations and the technical and corporate policies of crypto firms.

That Circle story draws heavily on court documents and interviews with detectives and prosecutors who describe a pattern of frozen assets that remain out of reach for victims, capturing the friction between new financial technology and existing seizure mechanisms. Woodman uses those specific cases to show how stablecoin issuers can comply with certain orders - such as freezing tokens - while arguing they lack the ability or authority to invalidate and reissue funds to compensate victims, a distinction that matters for regulators, police and scam targets alike. His reporting frames crypto not as a speculative market but as a plumbing system for criminal proceeds, with attention to the legal instruments and technical constraints that shape what authorities can actually do.

Beyond the Circle case, Woodman led the Coin Laundry investigation, a multi-month project that traced hundreds of crypto wallet addresses tied to criminal activity to map the scale of illicit funds flowing through the crypto ecosystem. In that work he coordinated a team of more than a hundred reporters and media partners and used on-chain analysis to follow money moving quickly and anonymously across borders, showing how crypto has become the foundation of a new shadow economy. Interviews around Coin Laundry describe his focus on building methods other reporters can use to “follow the money” in crypto, underlining a data-heavy, systems-oriented approach rather than one built around profiles or market commentary.

Offshore leaks: Paradise Papers to Cyprus Confidential

Woodman’s crypto work builds on years of reporting about offshore finance and leak-driven investigations that expose how powerful people move and hide wealth.

He has worked on major leak projects including the Paradise Papers, contributing stories that examine how business leaders, celebrities, royals and political donors use offshore structures and mega-trusts to manage assets and avoid scrutiny. His coverage in that project includes reporting on Kremlin-linked firms investing in major social media platforms, offshore strategies used by prominent U.S. political donors, and the offshore web surrounding figures close to Donald Trump, showing a consistent interest in the intersection of money, influence and secrecy.

In the Pandora Papers project, Woodman explains the immediate international fallout of the leak, outlining how newly exposed records reveal extensive offshore banking arrangements and prompt political and regulatory responses in multiple countries. He discusses how the project, led by ICIJ with partners around the world, uses large troves of leaked documents to reveal hidden financial networks and the challenges regulators face in policing them, reinforcing his role in collaborative, cross-border investigations.

His work continually returns to how legal vehicles and financial service providers enable the movement and concealment of wealth, whether the assets are traditional or held in crypto.

Woodman also works on projects that connect offshore finance to geopolitics and sanctions, such as Cyprus Confidential, which examines how Cyprus’s financial services sector has been used by associates of Vladimir Putin to hide wealth and avoid sanctions. In that investigation he looks at corporate structures, service firms and regulatory loopholes that allow sanctioned or high-risk clients to keep access to global financial markets, linking traditional offshore centres with newer concerns around cybercrime and crypto.

Across these leak-driven stories, his distinguishing feature is the ability to move from individual case studies to system-level patterns in how secrecy jurisdictions and intermediaries function.

FinCEN Files and banking oversight

Woodman extends his scrutiny of illicit finance beyond crypto and offshore law firms to mainstream banking, most prominently through his work on the FinCEN Files investigation. As part of an ICIJ team working with a large cache of confidential U.S. Treasury documents, he helps show how major Western banks enriched themselves while facilitating the movement of money for oligarchs, terrorists, drug traffickers and fraudsters. In public discussions of the project he describes the investigation as revealing a broken system in which banks repeatedly face serious charges related to money laundering, only to resolve them through fines and promises of reform instead of criminal prosecutions.

Within FinCEN Files, Woodman reports on Europe’s largest bank, HSBC, documenting how the institution told regulators it had cleaned up its anti-money laundering operations but still allowed suspicious transactions to flow through its systems.

He draws on suspicious activity reports and internal compliance records to show that bank warnings and regulatory settlements often fail to change underlying behaviour, adding a detailed, document-driven layer to broader debates about bank accountability. This banking work connects directly to his crypto coverage, where he explores how new instruments interact with older compliance frameworks, and to his offshore stories, where banks, law firms and service providers form a single extended ecosystem of financial secrecy.

Earlier investigations into corporate and state power

Before focusing heavily on leaked financial records and crypto, Woodman reported extensively on corporate practices, labour and the justice system, giving him a track record of investigating how institutions treat people with little leverage. His work includes a report on Walmart in which former managers describe pervasive inventory fraud, alleging leadership encouraged store managers to mask “shrinkage” - the value of goods lost or stolen - by manipulating inventory metrics and profit margins through improper techniques.

He has covered conditions in immigration detention, documenting allegations that detainees in ICE facilities faced threats of solitary confinement when they refused to work, and exploring how forced labour and extreme isolation function inside for-profit detention centres.

Woodman’s justice reporting also examines pretrial detention and capital punishment, including a Chicago investigation that found police missed more than 11,000 court dates since 2010, contributing to months or years of unnecessary delays for inmates awaiting trial. In another story he looks at a death penalty case in Mississippi, asking whether prosecutors prioritize securing convictions over ensuring they target the right person, again using specific case records to raise structural questions about the system.

He has written about a political action committee that trains corporate America to influence employee voting, connecting workplace dynamics with electoral strategy, and about barriers faced by ex-felons seeking voting rights and activists prosecuted for voting-related work.

Across these earlier investigations, Woodman’s reporting shows a consistent interest in how large organisations - corporations, immigration authorities, police departments or political operatives - use their power in ways that are often hidden from public view. That focus carries into his current beat, where he treats crypto and financial secrecy as another set of tools powerful actors and criminals use to shape outcomes, and where he relies on court filings, leaked records, data analysis and collaborative reporting to surface those dynamics.