Crypto-to-cash desks thrive in this financial secrecy, according to Sanders and other experts I interviewed. These services allow holders of cryptocurrency to cash out huge sums without touching the mainstream banking system or its safeguards on dirty money tied to organized crime, human trafficking or foreign sabotage operations. Along with a growing number of researchers, Sanders sees the expanding exchange of often-anonymous cryptocurrency with cash as posing a dire threat to the global anti-money laundering system that has been constructed over decades.
These services offer to dispatch couriers with bundles of cash in exchange for a customer’s cryptocurrency. Sometimes these services offer a premium for customers taking hard cash. Anti-money laundering experts say this raises a red flag because it indicates that an organization has lots of cash it wants to offload without using a bank. The crypto-to-cash desks that I and partners visited showed one logical endpoint of this development: a world where traditional safeguards against dirty money are openly challenged by a politically powerful industry wielding world-changing technology.
From Kyiv to Dubai, these cash desks operate in loosely regulated spaces, often with minimal identification from customers. Dubai is a renowned haven for financial secrecy, and has also become a thriving hub for cryptocurrency transactions. Some desks were generating new crypto wallet addresses every other day with which to conduct their business. A cab took us to a sleek complex of three-story buildings devoted to the wholesaling of gold bars, diamonds and jewelry. I did my own transaction. I sent 1,200 tether to their crypto wallet. The cash machine shuffled to life, and in an instant one of the men handed me a stack of money wrapped in a thick rubber band.
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