FINTRAC penalties nearly tripled in 2025. The median one was $117,975.
Every penalty FINTRAC has published in its rolling five year window, counted. Nothing here is our estimate; it is arithmetic on public record, and you can check it against the source.
Penalties imposed in 2025, against 12 the year before. Enforcement did not tighten gradually; it stepped.
The median penalty. Half of everything FINTRAC imposed was smaller than this.
Were under $250,000, which is the size of penalty a mid-sized firm receives, not a bank.
Every entity links to FINTRAC's own notice. These are enforcement actions of public record, published by the regulator.
It is not the banks. It is companies your size.
The headline penalties are enormous and rare. The ordinary ones are small, frequent, and land on firms with a compliance team of two or three. Real estate and money services businesses are the two most penalised sectors, at 23 notices each.
| 2025 | Xeltox Enterprises Ltd. | $176,960,190 |
| 2025 | Peken Global Limited | $19,552,000 |
| 2024 | The Toronto-Dominion Bank | $9,185,000 |
| 2024 | Binance Holdings Limited | $6,002,000 |
| 2022 | A real estate brokerage in Ontario | $22,770 |
| 2025 | A numbered company in Quebec | $23,100 |
| 2026 | A virtual currency dealer | $24,750 |
| 2025 | A money services business | $24,750 |
Entities in the smaller table are described by sector rather than named. FINTRAC names them; we do not need to.
3,939 money services businesses are registered in Canada right now.
And 409 have had a registration revoked. Counted from FINTRAC's own registry, which is public and updated monthly.
| Registered | 3,939 |
| Expired | 2,570 |
| Ceased | 1,618 |
| Revoked | 409 |
One mark per registered business, at true proportion. Marked positions are arbitrary and identify no company. Registry counted from FINTRAC; supervision figures from the FINTRAC Annual Report 2024-25.
Penalties are the tail. The examination is the event, and this sector sits at the top of the list.
Reading 23 marks in 3,939 as long odds is the mistake. A penalty is what happens after an examination goes badly, and examinations are running at a different scale entirely.
Formal examinations in 2024-25, across all sectors. Money services businesses were the most examined of them.
Assessment activities in the same year: questionnaires, monitoring meetings, targeted and full scope examinations.
The year over year increase in that supervisory activity, in FINTRAC's own words.
| Money transferring | 3,257 |
| Foreign exchange | 2,873 |
| Virtual currency | 2,348 |
| Payment service providers | 2,127 |
| Issuing or redeeming money orders | 445 |
| Cheque cashing | 324 |
| Crowdfunding platforms | 194 |
Three things follow from the record, and none of them are comfortable.
Each one is countable from the notices above, which is why they are worth more than anybody's opinion about where enforcement is heading.
It changed, and it has not changed back.
One penalty in 2021. Then ten to fourteen a year. Then thirty in 2025, with 2026 on a similar run rate.
Being small is not protection.
Seventy of the seventy-nine penalties with a stated amount were under a million dollars, and the smallest was $22,770. A firm that treats enforcement as a big-bank problem is reading the wrong end of the distribution.
It moved after this record was set.
Everything above was imposed under the old framework. For violations after 26 March 2026, maximum amounts rose up to forty times and the standard became whether a program is reasonably designed, risk based and effective. Source
Two public datasets, both under the Open Government Licence. Penalty figures come from FINTRAC's public notice of administrative monetary penalties, which holds notices for five years, so totals shift as older ones age out. Registry figures come from the Money Services Business Registry, which FINTRAC republishes monthly.
80 notices were in the window when we last counted, 79 of them stating an amount. Where a notice states no amount it is excluded from the money figures and still counted in the totals. Sector is taken from the wording of each notice.
Counted 2026-09-12. If you find an error in our arithmetic, tell us and we will correct it in the next edition.
The record says the odds changed. What would they find at your firm?
Twelve questions · about a minute · nothing is sent to us