The head of the Criminal Assets Bureau has said Irish criminals are hiding and laundering cash using virtual money.
Det Chief Supt Pat Clavin said the specialist agency, which confiscates the proceeds of crime, has highly trained officers who track down cryptocurrency and put a hold on it.
And he said they are often called on by other law enforcement agencies for their expertise in the area.
Speaking on RTE radio on Saturday Chief Supt Clavin said: “We get a lot of cash, a lot of money in bank accounts, cryptocurrencies, we get jewellery.
“Cryptocurrency is all about virtual currencies. It’s hard for someone of my vintage to get one’s head around it because I like to be able to feel and touch.
“We have trained people, we have digital specialists who are able to take possession of the computer or the mobile device, able to move those crypto currencies so that we are in control of them.
“We had our digital specialists who learned how to look at cryptocurrencies and indeed some of our specialists are able to help other law enforcement agencies throughout Europe and indeed beyond.
“We have to be in a position to deal with any kind of asset and cryptocurrency is an asset.
“We have had a small number of cases where we have taken proceeds of crime actions against bitcoin on more than one occasion and we were the first law enforcement agency in the world to take possession of another virtual currency called Ethereum.”
He said that despite it being popular among Irish criminals, cryptocurrency hasn’t taken off as quickly as he expected.
He added: “I would have expected it to probably grow faster. It hasn’t got the widespread social acceptance that I might have thought two years ago that I would have got.
“It’s like any commodity, any asset, it needs to get public acceptance in order to be successful so it hasn’t grown to the extent that I would have expected.”
And he said apart from virtual currency, they all confiscate a lot of luxury goods.
He continued: “We get a lot of handbags, we get a lot watches, we get a lot of jewellery, we get a lot of evidence that people would have a modest home and they have spent an inordinate amount of money in needless renovations because they have loads of surplus cash.
“In some incidents it’s very tastefully done, in other incidents it wouldn’t do anything for me.
“There’s something called a man cave, that you have a shed in your back garden and the man of the house does that up and has it so that he can chill out and do his business uninterrupted. We are coming across that quite frequently.”
