Organized crime gangs in Ireland are renting vaults to store the private keys and seed phrases that control crypto wallets, alongside cash, luxury watches and handbags, the head of the Criminal Assets Bureau has said.

Detective Chief Superintendent Michael Gubbins, who runs the bureau, the Irish state’s asset-seizure agency, told the Sunday Independent the practice emerged from its own investigations and has been reported to the government’s Anti-Money Laundering Steering Committee.

Vault contents, he said, “could be cryptocurrency keys or cash or watches or could even be passports.” He added: “Again, it’s from our experience, what we would have seen around those matters.”

The committee is preparing Ireland for EU rules due next summer that will ban cash transactions above €10,000 and require businesses to identify anyone spending €3,000 or more in cash. Crypto-asset service providers, luxury goods retailers and crowdfunding platforms all face tighter supervision. Ireland published its first national anti-money laundering strategy last month, following an action plan that tightened crypto safeguards.

“Still quite basic”

Gangs turn to crypto to spread risk against seizure and for the cover they think it provides. “They believe there’s an anonymity attached to it,” Gubbins said in an interview alongside the report, though he pointed to price volatility and the risk of losing wallet passwords as offsetting problems.

Nevertheless, the use of crypto in Ireland is “still quite basic,” he told the paper, and cash remains the dominant form of dirty money. “It’s still a cash business for those engaged in drug trafficking.”

The bureau has instead seen professional launderers for hire, including operators of hawala, an informal transfer system in which cash deposited in one country is paid out in another without crossing a border. Gubbins put the commission at roughly 6%. In one such investigation the bureau seized €230,000 from a safe deposit box at a private vault company.

The bureau is separately working through the largest crypto seizure in its history, having cracked the first of 12 wallets in March with Europol’s help. They hold 6,000 BTC taken from a cannabis grower in 2019, whose private keys were written down and hidden in a fishing rod case that was later lost. Gubbins said more than €130 million of the €360 million holding has now been realized.

The bureau returned almost €15 million to the Irish exchequer last year.