10 Years In Prison For Crypto Fraud: What Brazil's Bill Means For Scammers

Brazil is moving deeper into the second phase of crypto regulation: not just deciding whether digital assets are legal, but deciding how hard to crack down on the people who use them to hide fraud, move dirty money or operate outside the financial system.

What Is Brazil's Crypto Fraud Bill?

The proposal most closely tied to the new prison-risk discussion is PL 746/2026 in Brazil's Chamber of Deputies, introduced by Deputy Tabata Amaral on February 25, 2026.

The bill would update Brazil's financial crimes, money-laundering, and organized crime laws. Its core crypto pieces would:

• make clear that illegal foreign-exchange movement can happen through virtual assets, cryptoassets, or parallel settlement systems;
• Add the use of a virtual asset as an aggravating factor for money laundering.
• increase investigative access to registration and financial-intelligence data in organized crime cases, while preserving bank statement and content requests for judicial authorization;
• draw a clearer line between good-faith financial management and deliberately reckless or fraudulent management.

The bill text says Brazil's economic crime problem has moved into digital channels and cites rising digital fraud, money laundering, and the use of cryptoassets in more sophisticated structures. For investors, exchanges, and victims, that matters because prosecutors would have a cleaner statutory path for arguing that crypto was not just a payment rail, but part of the criminal design.

What The 10-Year Number Actually Means

Brazil already has a virtual-assets framework through Law 14.478/2022. Among other changes, it added a virtual-asset fraud offense to the Penal Code. That offense carries a 4-to-8-year prison term plus a fine when someone organizes, manages, offers, distributes, or intermediates operations involving virtual assets, securities, or financial assets to obtain illicit advantage and harm another person.

PL 746/2026 points at a different statute: Brazil's money-laundering law, Law 9.613/1998. Money laundering already carries a 3-to-10-year prison range. The bill would add the use of a virtual asset as one of the situations that can raise the sentence by one-third to two-thirds.

So the simplified version is:

Legal path in Brazil	Current or proposed?	Prison exposure
Virtual-asset fraud under Law 14.478/2022	Already law	4 to 8 years, plus a fine
Money laundering under Law 9.613/1998	Already law	3 to 10 years, plus a fine
Virtual assets as a laundering aggravator under PL 746/2026	Proposed, not passed	Adds a one-third to two-thirds increase if enacted
Evasion of foreign exchange controls through virtual assets under PL 746/2026	Proposed, not passed	Would clarify that the 2-to-6-year foreign-exchange evasion offense can apply when virtual assets are used

Where Is The Bill In The Passage Cycle?

As of June 14, 2026, PL 746/2026 has not passed. According to the Chamber's official tracker, it was presented on February 25, 2026, and sent on March 23 to the Public Security and Combating Organized Crime Committee, the Finance and Taxation Committee, and the Constitution, Justice and Citizenship Committee. It was received by the Public Security committee on March 25 and had Deputy Pedro Paulo assigned as rapporteur on March 26. Its status is "Aguardando Parecer," meaning it is waiting for a committee report.

That puts the bill early in the legislative cycle. It still has to clear committee review, and because the Chamber lists it as subject to plenary consideration, it would also need a floor vote before moving through the Senate and presidential stage.

There is also a separate 2026 crypto proposal, PL 2946/2026, introduced on June 9, 2026. That bill focuses on authorization rules for virtual-asset service providers. It is not the prison-term bill, but it matters because licensing and criminal enforcement usually move together: regulators define who may operate, while prosecutors pursue the operators who lie, steal, or launder.

What This Means For Scammers

For scammers, the bill would make three tactics riskier. First, it would reduce the "crypto is not money" defense. A fraudster who moves value through stablecoins, exchange accounts, self-custody wallets, or offshore settlement routes would have less room to argue that the transaction sits outside older foreign-exchange and laundering concepts.

Second, it would make repeatable laundering patterns more visible in sentencing. If a fake investment platform collects reais, converts funds into crypto, and sends value abroad, prosecutors could argue that the crypto layer is not incidental. It is part of concealment.

Third, it would increase pressure on centralized platforms. Exchanges, brokers, and wallet service providers that touch customer funds may face more requests for identifying data, transaction records, and intelligence reports. That does not eliminate the need for court orders where deeper financial privacy is involved, but it does make crypto investigations less dependent on informal cooperation.

For legitimate users, the bill is not a ban on holding Bitcoin, stablecoins, or other assets. It is about criminal conduct. Still, it reinforces a practical point for anyone using crypto exchanges or wallets: records, counterparties, and platform compliance matter when a transaction is later investigated.