The probe was triggered last year after Wise accounts repeatedly appeared in hundreds of cross-border requests for judicial assistance (European Investigation Orders) from more than 30 countries. Explain me this

To understand why this triggered the investigation, you have to look at how international law enforcement works and how Wise is structured in Europe.

Here is the breakdown of what happened:

1. What is a "Request for Judicial Assistance" (EIO)?

When police or prosecutors in one country are investigating a crime, they only have legal jurisdiction within their own borders. If the money trail leads to a bank account in another country, they cannot simply demand the records.

Instead, they must issue a formal, legal request to the authorities of the other country, asking them to gather the evidence on their behalf. Within the European Union, this specific legal tool is called a European Investigation Order (EIO).

2. The Brexit Factor: Why Belgium?

Before Brexit, Wise operated across Europe primarily out of London. After Brexit, UK financial firms lost their automatic right to operate in the EU.

To continue serving European customers, Wise established a central EU hub in Brussels, Belgium. They use a system called "passporting," which allows them to serve customers in France, Germany, Spain, and the rest of the European Economic Area entirely through their regulated Belgian entity (Wise Europe).

3. How the Dominoes Fell

This centralized structure meant that every time a criminal used Wise anywhere in Europe, the legal paperwork had to go through Belgium. The timeline looked like this:

• The Local Crimes: Police in over 30 different countries were investigating their own local cases of fraud, drug trafficking, and corruption.
• Following the Money: During these independent investigations, local police kept finding that the criminals were using Wise accounts to move their illicit money.
• The Flood of Requests: Because Wise's European legal entity is based in Brussels, prosecutors from all 30+ countries had to send European Investigation Orders to the Belgian Public Prosecutor's Office, asking them to subpoena the account records from Wise Europe.

The Trigger Point

The Belgian authorities didn't initiate this investigation out of thin air. They started noticing a glaring pattern: their desks were being flooded with hundreds of EIOs from all over the continent, and the common denominator in all these criminal files was Wise.

The sheer volume of these requests—involving roughly €500 million in suspicious transactions—signaled to Belgian prosecutors that this wasn't just a coincidence. It suggested a systemic vulnerability, prompting them to launch a massive investigation into whether Wise Europe's Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) controls were fundamentally broken.