The battle between cops and criminals on the new frontier of financial crime. As long as people are stealing money, there has been an industry ready to launder it. This is exactly what happened when our economy went digital. 

Rinsed reveals how organised crimes have joined forces with the world’s most sophisticated cybercriminals, resulting in virtual money-laundering machine too intelligent for most regulators to crack. 

Geoff reveals how thieves are uniting to successfully get away with the most atrocious crimes on an unprecedented scale.

Rinsed follows the money from the outrageous luxury of Dubai hotels to sleepy backwaters of coastal Ireland, from the backstreets of Nigeria to the secretive zones of North Korea, to investigate this new cyber super cartel.  Geoff White uncovers the extraordinary true story of his-tech laundering and exposes its terrible human cost.

In 2017,  a Colombian homeowner broke through an interior wall of his property and was shocked and overjoyed to find a hidden chamber within, complete with its own canteen and bathrooms the fetid bolt-hole  was deserted. It was only when the owner rummaged through it, he realised what he was touching: the remnants of  approximately $1.8million in cash.

Such stashes are an occupational hazard of organised crime. The Medellin bolt-hole had been constructed for the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar ( as the homeowner was his nephew Nicolas). Pablo had a enormous problem of laundering untold billions through local banking system and turn bulky-sacks of grubby greenbacks into usable clean cash. Pablo could only partially mastered prior to his death in 1993, leaving the pile of perished notes, as he inhabited an analogue world  where cheques, cards and cash were the principal media of money transactions. Now with advent of technology opening of new ways to move cash and it is this alliance of Silicon Valley wizardry and crime that is, subject of technology correspondent Geoff White’s Rinsed. Geoff’s first book, The Lazarus Heist, is about a group of North Korean hackers.

White reveals three discrete stages of any money laundering operation, placement ( not leaving your cash rotting in hide-holes but finding a way to inject it into the financial system, mashed with legitimate cash flows a process known as layering before that laundered proceeds can be used to purchase apparently innocent assets). These are the stores of value that makes the crime pay.

Technology has made all this easier and much more scalable. The beauty of digital currency lies not just in its anonymity but its flexibility and access  to deep global markets as opposed to local banks. Payments can be sliced up and slipped into million of digital wallets, their sheer volume rendering any tracing much more difficult.

Mixers – computer programs that slosh together covert  and innocent digital currency – obviate the need to wash funds laboriously through the bookies or some cash business. As technology permits distance  you can run you dodgy operations from almost anywhere in the world and far from where the crimes are actually taking place. The Dark Web permit criminal IT suppliers, hacking gangs and fraudsters to create alliances discreetly online.

Large increasingly connected illicit economy, where dark web online marketplaces such as the Russian Hydra drug-dealing website operate as criminal parodies of eBay or Amazon. Nigerian gangs like Black Axe operate  their advance fee scams globally, using computer-locking ransomeware or business email compromise where they trick a company into making apparently legitimate payments into a bogus account. According to one police officer “ BS is cheap, it’s abundant, it’s infinite”.

White focus on the techniques detective use to stalk their cyber prey, even bitcoin is traceable if you follow the digital breadcrumbs through the pubic blockchain ledger.

Decline in burglary by 86 per cent in England and Wales  over the past 30 Yeats  reveals how much crime has migrated online.  A click of a mouse  from you desk can rob millions without  even breaking into someone’s property.

Ransomware attack took down Colonial Pipeline, a US fuel supplier and almost led to petrol shortages across the US. Crypto-heist from a Singapore-based gaming company Sky Mavis, which netted an astonishing $625 millon, using an autonomous mixer with no controlling owner, making it a perfect technocratic crime as much of the loot was never recovered.

All this missed innovation pushing boundaries, can the good guys win the tech arms race and keep the criminals at bay.

Rinsed is all about powerful, amoral systems and how they can be used or misused.

Rinsed: From Cartels to Crypto by Geoff White, Penguin Business £20, 288 pages.