Blockchain and Digital Assets
Matt Green
September 2026
Channel 4 Dispatches: Tommy Robinson: Where’s the Money Gone? broadcast on 9 September 2026, is the culmination of a year-long investigation by journalist Matt Shea into the finances of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, a British far-right activist and co-founder of the English Defence League who has become a prominent anti-Islam and anti-immigration campaigner.
The programme examined how Robinson raises money from supporters and asked whether funds collected for campaigns, legal cases and alleged victims were used as donors expected.
The Dispatches investigation found that Robinson has raised substantial sums from supporters through online appeals, events and cryptocurrency donations. While Robinson insisted that the funds have been used appropriately for campaigning and related activities, Matt Shea argued that there were significant unanswered questions about how the money raised from supporters was collected, managed and distributed.
The investigation team tracked several fundraising appeals made on behalf of individuals and, according to Dispatches, some of those whom Robinson has publicly stated he was fundraising for told investigators they did not receive the money they believed had been raised in their name.
This led the team to examining just where that money has gone, and where Lawrence Stephens Partner Matt Green, “One of the country’s leading crypto lawyers”, stepped in to help.
The investigators analysed cryptocurrency wallets linked to fundraising appeals. Because blockchain transactions are public, these provided one of the few verifiable sources of donation data available to the programme. Matt worked with Token Recovery, a global digital-asset investigations firm specialising in blockchain forensics, to explain the movement of crypto funds on the on-chain. This evidence showed that the funds in the fundraising appeal wallet were moved to a wallet associated with an online gambling platform. What was less clear was who moved those funds.
Matt Green commented: “most blockchains are an open ledger, so moving funds from one wallet to another is all public information. Who those wallets are controlled by however is not always clear. Through data attribution, specialist firms like Token Recovery can identify which organisations (like crypto exchanges, dark net market places etc.) are associated with wallets, to show assets moving to particular parties who may be legitimate or otherwise”.
In response to Dispatches Robinson said he did not accept [Dispatches] “chain-analysis as proof… I deny that donor funds – cash, crypto, or otherwise – were a gambling float”.
