Organized crime gangs in Ireland are renting private vaults to store the seed phrases and private keys that control cryptocurrency wallets — keeping them alongside cash, luxury watches, handbags, and passports — according to the head of the country's Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB).
Detective Chief Superintendent Michael Gubbins, who directs the bureau, Ireland's asset-seizure agency, told the Sunday Independent that the practice emerged from CAB's 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," based on what investigators have encountered.
Why Vaults
The logic is risk-spreading. Gangs turn to crypto for the anonymity they believe it provides and to complicate seizure — though Gubbins pointed to price volatility and the risk of losing wallet passwords as problems criminals face too. Professional money launderers for hire, including operators of hawala networks that move value across borders without moving cash, charge commissions of roughly 6%, he said. In one such investigation, the bureau seized €230,000 from a safe deposit box at a private vault company.
Despite the vault habit, Gubbins described criminal use of crypto in Ireland as "still quite basic." Cash remains the dominant medium for drug-trafficking proceeds: "It's still a cash business for those engaged in drug trafficking."
The Largest Crypto Seizure in the Bureau's History
The bureau is separately working through its largest-ever crypto seizure: 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. In March, with Europol's help, CAB cracked the first of the 12 wallets involved. Gubbins said more than €130 million of the roughly €360 million holding has now been realized — with the rest pending the recovery of the remaining keys.
The bureau returned almost €15 million to the Irish exchequer last year.
Regulatory Context
The disclosures arrive as Ireland prepares 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, with tighter supervision for crypto-asset service providers, luxury goods retailers, and crowdfunding platforms. Ireland published its first national anti-money-laundering strategy last month, including enhanced checks on private crypto wallets.
For security teams, the detail worth noting is the custody model: when keys are physical objects in rented boxes, seizure becomes a physical-access problem — which is precisely the kind the Criminal Assets Bureau has spent decades solving.
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