Italy Arrests 30 Over Mafia 'Hidden Bank' Using Crypto

Italy’s financial police have arrested 30 people suspected of running a “banca occulta”, a hidden bank, for organised crime from behind a car-rental company in Pero, on the edge of Milan. The Guardia di Finanza says it uncovered more than €110m of false invoices and laundering worth €68m that used cryptocurrency, ANSA reported on 21 October. Sixteen suspects are in prison and 14 under house arrest, and police are carrying out an emergency seizure order for more than €21m.

All of this is still an allegation. The case is at the preliminary investigation stage, and the Guardia di Finanza’s statement stresses that “the presumption of innocence of the suspects applies” (TSN translation), money.it reported. What investigators describe is less a crypto scheme than a full banking service for criminals, with crypto as one of the exits.

Investigators say three men with mafia ties ran the ‘bank’

According to La Stampa, investigators believe the operation was headed by three Italians close to mafia groups. Two are described as contacts of ‘Ndrangheta clans from Crotone, already definitively convicted in the earlier Infinito and Aemilia inquiries, and the third as a member of the Camorra’s Casalesi clan. Chinese and Albanian accomplices supported them. ANSA says suspects linked to organised crime from Foggia, the so-called “fourth mafia”, are also involved.

The charges centre on a criminal association aggravated by the mafia method, covering international money laundering, tax fraud, bankruptcy offences, drug trafficking and weapons offences. Part of the proceeds allegedly went into a mafia “fondo di solidarietà” (solidarity fund) for jailed ‘Ndrangheta members, La Stampa reports. The Guardia di Finanza’s Milan and Monza Brianza commands ran the operation for Milan’s anti-mafia prosecutors, with more than 350 officers, searches across 26 Italian provinces according to Prima Milano Ovest, and arrests in Spain and Switzerland supported by Interpol’s I-CAN unit against the ‘Ndrangheta. Officers are seizing cash, bank accounts, cryptocurrency, cars, boats, jewellery, luxury watches and cash-counting machines.

The case also reaches inside the justice system. A Guardia di Finanza inspector is under house arrest on corruption charges, accused of passing confidential information about a relative’s tax debts to a Chinese suspect in exchange for €3,000 in cash between May and September 2025, La Stampa reports, citing the order of investigating judge Luca Milani, which runs to nearly 90 charges. Prima Milano Ovest’s account describes him as a former member of the force. ANSA says a Milan court employee is also under house arrest, accused of unauthorised access to IT systems, and that a Milan lawyer is involved in the investigation.

False invoices, cash couriers and an exit through crypto

Investigators describe four stages. First, cash was collected: two Chinese nationals gathered money largely from tax offences, and a drug trafficker allegedly handed over more than €5m in cash through couriers, La Stampa says. In return, the cash suppliers received the equivalent in cryptocurrency or bank transfers to accounts in Asia, Canada and South America.

Second, a network of shell companies, registered to front men at fake addresses mainly in Lombardy and Campania, issued invoices for work never done to construction, logistics and services firms, which used them to cut their taxable income, according to Prima Milano Ovest. The shells were deliberately put into bankruptcy and replaced with new ones. Third, once a client paid an invoice by bank transfer, the network handed the same amount back in cash, minus a commission of 2% to 5%.

Finally, the money that built up in the shell companies’ accounts was moved to accounts in Luxembourg, Lithuania and Germany and turned into cryptocurrency controlled by the group, La Stampa reports. Prima Milano Ovest’s account says the funds went from those accounts to exchanges, which sent the crypto to the group’s wallets. The investigators traced about €68m sent abroad in total. Clients could thus move money outside official channels, “aggirando i presidi antiriciclaggio” (getting around anti-money-laundering safeguards, TSN translation), La Stampa writes.

The warning signs were in bank accounts, not on a blockchain

For anyone who works in anti-money laundering, the striking point is how late crypto enters the story. By investigators’ account, the money first passed through Italian company accounts and then through banks in three other EU countries before it reached an exchange. Every one of those steps leaves records with a regulated firm. Shell companies run by nominees, with short lives and planned bankruptcies, billing for work that never happened and sending the money straight back as cash, make up a textbook invoice-laundering pattern. The crypto leg turned the proceeds into something easy to move, but most of the detectable signals came before it.

The phishing detail sharpens that point. Prima Milano Ovest’s account says the shell companies’ bank accounts also received transfers from people who later reported being scammed while trying to invest in crypto. Victim payments landing in the account of a construction-sector shell is precisely the kind of mismatch that transaction monitoring and fraud reports are meant to link. How many of those signals were reported, and when, is not in the published accounts. That is the obvious question for the banks and exchanges involved, none of which has been named.

Enforcement is chasing the same flows on both sides of the Atlantic

The Milan case comes as US authorities also push on crypto-linked crime and bank controls. A Justice Department unit says it has restrained $938m in crypto tied to Southeast Asian scam centres. FinCEN fined Bank of America $1.2bn over money-laundering failures, and the OCC’s GENIUS Act rule for stablecoin issuers leaves its AML requirements to separate rules. In the UK, the FCA is consulting on financial-crime guidance for DeFi.

The investigators call the crypto bought “di difficile tracciamento”, hard to trace (TSN translation). Yet the seizure list includes cryptocurrency, and investigators say they followed the funds through exchanges to wallets controlled by the group. How much of the €21m being seized is in crypto, and how much of the €68m reached it, has not been published. Those two figures will show whether the hidden bank’s last step was as hard to follow as the investigators’ own phrase suggests.