Ireland's Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) has told an anti-money laundering committee that criminal organisations in the country are increasingly renting private vaults to store crypto private keys and seed phrases, keeping them alongside cash, watches, designer bags and passports.
Michael Gubbins, director of CAB, the state agency responsible for seizing criminal assets, described the practice in remarks reported to the Anti-Money Laundering Steering Committee. "It could be crypto keys, cash, watches or even passports," he said, describing the storage methods used by criminal groups as "still fairly basic". He added that "drug trafficking remains a cash-based business", pointing to the continued reliance on physical currency even as digital assets enter the mix.
The disclosure comes as CAB works through the largest crypto seizure in its history, an estimated portfolio worth roughly €360 million tied to Clifton Collins, who was convicted of cannabis production. Authorities confiscated 6,000 bitcoins belonging to Collins in 2019. He had split the holdings across twelve separate wallets and printed the private keys on paper, which he hid inside a fishing rod case at a rented house in Farnaught, County Galway.
Access to the wallets
Investigators, working with Europol, managed to access the first of the twelve wallets in March 2026. That wallet alone held approximately 500 bitcoins. To date, more than €130 million has been realised from the total estimated €360 million portfolio, according to CAB.
The agency's use of private vaults for evidence gathering has also produced smaller but tangible results. In one case, CAB seized €230,000 in cash stored in a vault rented from a private company. Last year, the bureau returned nearly €15 million to the Irish Treasury from its recovery operations.
New EU rules on the horizon
The vault findings surface as the European Union prepares to tighten controls on cash transactions. A new EU anti-money laundering regulation will apply from 10 July 2027, banning cash payments above €10,000 and requiring identity checks on cash transactions of at least €3,000. The rules will be overseen by AMLA, the newly established European authority based in Frankfurt.
CAB's observations suggest that even as regulators push to close off cash channels, criminal networks are adapting by combining physical storage methods with digital assets rather than abandoning cash altogether. Separately, informal value-transfer networks such as hawala remain in use by some groups, with operators typically charging a commission of around 6 percent to move funds outside formal banking channels.
