Crypto Crimes And Digital Assets: New Regulations In Indonesian Criminal Law

Abstract

Indonesia's rapid integration into the global cryptocurrency ecosystem has generated systemic vulnerabilities that existing penal instruments are structurally ill-equipped to address. With more than 17 million registered crypto-asset investors and transaction volumes surpassing IDR 650 trillion by 2024, the digital financial landscape has simultaneously expanded the surface area for sophisticated crimes — including rug pulls, phishing, and illicit exchange operations — that fall outside the explicit reach of conventional criminal law. This study examines the normative construction of Indonesian criminal law in addressing crypto-asset crime, maps the doctrinal gaps within existing regulatory instruments, and proposes an adaptive legal reform model. Employing a normative-juridical methodology integrating statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches, the analysis draws on primary, secondary, and tertiary legal materials. The findings demonstrate that current instruments remain partial, interpretive, and reliant on analogical reasoning that is epistemically in tension with the nullum crimen sine lege principle. The P2SK Law (Law No. 4 of 2023), Government Regulation No. 49 of 2024, and POJK No. 27 of 2024 jo. POJK No. 23 of 2025 have collectively reoriented the supervisory paradigm toward Digital Financial Assets (DFA) under the Financial Services Authority (OJK), yet independent criminal offense qualifications for crypto-native crimes remain absent. This study concludes that the establishment of a lex specialis governing digital asset crimes, the strengthening of institutional digital forensic capacity, and the expansion of mutual legal assistance frameworks across jurisdictions constitute an urgent tripartite reform agenda for Indonesia's national criminal justice system.