Ireland’s Criminal Assets Bureau, led by Detective Chief Superintendent Michael Gubbins, has revealed that criminal gangs rent private vaults to store crypto wallet seed phrases and private keys alongside cash, luxury watches and passports. This practice has been reported to the government committee preparing Ireland for new EU anti-money laundering rules, which will ban cash transactions above 10,000 euros starting next summer. The bureau’s chief nevertheless described crypto use by criminals in Ireland as still quite basic, with cash remaining the dominant method for laundering dirty money. In a separate investigation, the bureau has realized over 130 million euros of the 360 million euros held in 6,000 BTC confiscated from a cannabis grower in 2019, whose private keys were hidden in a fishing rod case.
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