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US private capital group KKR is in talks to acquire Arctos Partners, one of the pioneers of the private equity industry’s push into professional sports, according to people briefed on the matter.

KKR has accumulated more than $700bn in assets, making it one of the largest players in private capital.

Its interest in Arctos comes as it looks to wealthy individual investors and ordinary retirement savers for future asset growth, making sports investments that attract interest from everyday investors an appealing new product offering.

The prospective deal would also signal KKR’s push into the booming market for second-hand private equity fund stakes, where Arctos’s executives have particular expertise.

Arctos owns stakes in some of the world’s most popular sports teams including European football giants Liverpool and Paris Saint-Germain.

One person with direct knowledge the discussions said KKR was in advanced talks to take a majority stake in Arctos. However, both people cautioned that the negotiations were ongoing and could yet collapse.

Arctos had also fielded interest from other large private capital groups and asset managers, the people said, and any deal would be likely to require sign off from the various professional leagues in which its portfolio teams compete.

Arctos was founded in 2019 by two executives who combined knowledge of sports, entertainment and private equity.

David O’Connor was previously an executive at the owner of the New York Rangers ice hockey team and the talent agency CAA. His co-founder Ian Charles was an early adviser to the now booming marketplace for second hand private equity fund stakes.

Together they have led private equity’s push into sports, buying minority stakes directly in popular sports teams.

In addition to its European football stakes, Arctos owns minority stakes in more than a dozen franchises.

Those include high profile US teams such as the National Basketball Association’s Golden State Warriors and Utah Jazz, the baseball World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers, and two National Football League teams, the Los Angeles Chargers and Buffalo Bills.

It is also a minority investor in the Aston Martin Formula 1 team.

Arctos, which manages over $14bn in regulatory assets according to securities filings, has also built a business providing tailored debt and equity financing to the private capital industry.

Earlier this year, that unit of Arctos helped to finance the management buyout of private credit firm Hayfin from a Canadian pension fund.

KKR’s interest in Arctos comes as the New York based pioneer of big private equity takeovers has used its substantial cash reserves and valuable stock currency to expand into insurance and debt-based investments.

In 2023, KKR took full ownership of insurer Global Atlantic at a valuation of more than $7bn, its largest ever acquisition. While a price for Arctos could not be established, any deal would be among KKR’s biggest ever.

KKR and Arctos declined to comment.

Key insights:

• • • Blockchain’s transparency is a double-edged sword— While criminals use crypto for illicit activities, the permanent and public nature of the blockchain ledger creates an undeniable trail, making it a powerful tool for law enforcement to track and seize illicit funds.

    • The rise of crypto forensics— A growing industry of specialized firms and investigators is leveraging blockchain’s inherent design to unravel complex financial crimes, demonstrating that “lost” crypto funds can often be recovered.

    • An evolving battlefield— Despite the ongoing challenges posed by tools like mixers and privacy coins, blockchain technology is fundamentally shifting how financial crime is fought, turning the very system criminals exploit into the means of their capture.

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Cryptocurrencies and other digital assets are used by criminals, which is great for catching them. Indeed, the biggest criticism of crypto since its inception has been its criminal use, which was estimated to be almost half of all activity by the end of 2017. In the past three months alone, asset seizures and forfeitures of more than $22 billion in crypto have been made by authorities in the United Kingdom, the United States, and their international partners.

These historic interceptions of illicit funds prove that the fundamental architecture of blockchain — the digital ledger that underpins most virtual transactions — makes it the perfect tool for catching criminals, validating the hypothesis of Satoshi Nakamoto, the presumed pseudonymous of the person or persons who developed bitcoin, that fraud could be prevented through intentional system design.

While criminals assumed they could optimize their illegal activities using crypto to obfuscate fund flows, the blockchain ledger’s immutability has created a niche for financial crime investigators seeking to unravel these cases. Companies like Chainalysis, Elliptic, and TRM Labs have become synonymous with these investigations, joined by a growing network of smaller firms that are democratizing crypto investigations, combating terrorist financing and online child abuse. Ultimately working to secure seized assets and prevent further harm. By all measures, the ecosystem is expanding rapidly.

Every crypto transaction creates a permanent trail that allows investigators to catch criminals even years after their crimes. This is how, a digital exchange hack in 2016 that resulted in the theft of 120,000 Bitcoin worth $72 million (at the time) and was chronicled in the Netflix documentary Biggest Heist Ever was wrapped up years later with the seizure of $4.5 billion in crypto and the arrest of the two alleged perpetrators in 2022. Law enforcement may not move as fast as crypto, but if the whale is big enough, they will catch it.

Indeed, the scale of cryptocurrency-enabled crime threatens Western economic stability. The FBI received 149,686 crypto-fraud complaints in 2024, totaling $9.3 billion in losses, likely significantly lower than the true figure. More than 100,000 people are trafficked and forced to operate scams from compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar. The Prince Holding Group, a transnational criminal organization headed by Chen Zhi, generated $30 million daily at its peak, approximately $10.95 billion annually.

Financial crime as economic warfare

These are just headlines. Further research in the Netherlands shows that only 11.8% of fraud victims actually report being victimized. While many dismiss fraud and blame victims, crypto-related fraud is becoming economic warfare systematically draining wealth from Western economies while enslaving hundreds of thousands in forced labor camps across the Global South. With potentially $80 billion lost annually to crypto fraud, the impact extends beyond the 1.14% of the US federal budget it represents. This illicit outflow causes loss of productive capital, tax base erosion, and reduced economic activity.

Yet the technology accused of enabling this new generation of fraud simultaneously provides the tools to detect and combat these criminal organizations more successfully than any financial crime fighting technology in history. The Chen Zhi case, easily the largest asset forfeiture in US history at around $15 billion, demonstrates this perfectly.

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Every crypto transaction creates a permanent trail that allows investigators to catch criminals even years after their crimes.

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This is why I’ve spent the last four years studying the crypto ATM industry. While most financial crime professionals saw a problematic service in a problematic industry, I saw a massive dataset of criminal activity that could predict other illicit activity beyond crypto ATMs. This dataset helped identify terrorist financiers, vendors of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and countless scams and frauds. Layer data-rich sources like crypto ATMs with blockchain data, and a good investigator can achieve remarkable results.

Modern blockchain analytics leverage the features Nakamoto designed for trust and verification. Immutability makes evidence tampering impossible and investigations public; and verifiability allows investigators to validate every step of a criminal’s crypto trail. Consensus mechanisms create a distributed jury of millions, validating the evidence chain further. These features enabled authorities to map the Prince Holding Group’s entire criminal empire, revealing 76,000 fake social media accounts operated from facilities using 1,250 phones across 10 Cambodian compounds, and tie it to $15 billion in bitcoin.

The same technology facilitating billions of dollars in pig butchering scams annually enables law enforcement to catch the transnational criminals and recover funds. Traditional financial crimes disappear into offshore accounts and shell companies, often leaving investigators blind. However, as anyone in blockchain forensics knows, Locard’s Exchange Principle remains true: Every contact leaves a trace. Blockchain’s public ledger means every suspicious transaction leaves a permanent clue.

Nakamoto’s vision of “electronic transactions without relying on trust” inadvertently created a system for establishing criminal culpability. The blockchain’s public nature convinced criminals they could hide in plain sight, but Nakamoto saw that participants would be deterred from fraud by this transparency. The naive assumption that users had nothing to hide if doing nothing wrong quickly revealed plenty were doing wrong. Still, the system proved fit for purpose once tools were built to catch bad actors. Nakamoto’s white paper’s emphasis on preventing double-spending through public verification created a framework in which crime-spending leaves permanent evidence. All a good investigator needs is time.

The rise of crypto forensics

As crypto advances, tools like bridges, mixers, and privacy coins pose constant challenges for investigators, but claiming the money is gone when crypto is involved is simply false. As blockchain forensics advances, criminals face an uncomfortable truth: They’ve been conducting operations on a permanent, public, immutable ledger. Their only protection is time and cryptographic puzzles that an entire industry is working to unravel.

While some industry press reporting has been diligent in pointing out some of the challenges in the industry and some of what’s been missed, there are a lot more illicit fraud cases that never see the light of day because of what has been prevented by blockchain forensics. And while it may not be perfect, the fact that there is an industry working to build a safer financial system than what has gone before is commendable, and the accountability that public ledgers have enabled is energizing for those that must police it.

Unfortunately, the $15 billion Chen Zhi seizure isn’t the end but the beginning. With at least $64 billion stolen annually, these criminals have little incentive to stop. While some scam compounds have been dismantled, reports indicate they’re simply being relocated.

Nevertheless, blockchain is setting a new paradigm in financial crime, one in which the technology enabling crime will eventually become the weapon that defeats it.

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