Italy's Mafia Crypto Bank: 30 Accused of Moving €68M From a Car-Rental Office Near Milan

At dawn on Wednesday 21 October 2026, Swiss police arrested a 62-year-old man born in Naples in a rented flat in Cassarate, a lakeside district of Lugano. That same morning more than 350 officers of the Guardia di Finanza, Italy's financial police, were searching in 26 cities and provinces, from Turin to Reggio Calabria, and police in Spain were serving European arrest warrants. Investigators say every thread led back to a car-rental office in Pero, a small town on the north-western edge of Milan.

Behind the rental business, the Guardia di Finanza says, sat a "banca occulta", a hidden bank. In its press release that morning it said the bank was run by three Italians it describes as close to the mafia. Two are long-standing contacts of 'Ndrangheta clans from Crotone, in Calabria, already definitively convicted in two earlier cases known as Infinito and Aemilia. The third is described as a member of the Casalesi clan of the Camorra, the mafia of the Naples area. Chinese and Albanian accomplices helped them, police say.

Investigators say they reconstructed more than €110 million of false invoices and about €68 million transferred abroad, part of it turned into cryptocurrency. At the European Central Bank's reference rate on 21 October 2026, $1.1234 to the euro, that is about $123.6 million of invoices and $76.4 million sent out of Italy. A judge ordered 30 suspects held, 16 in prison and 14 under house arrest, and officers began enforcing an urgent order to seize more than €21 million, about $23.6 million. Bloomberg reported the raids the same day.

The order was signed by Luca Milani, a preliminary investigations judge at the Milan court, in an inquiry led by the anti-mafia unit (DDA) of the Milan prosecutor's office with Italy's national anti-mafia directorate. The alleged crimes are criminal association aggravated by the mafia method, international money laundering, tax fraud, bankruptcy offences, drug trafficking and weapons offences. Nobody has been tried. The Guardia di Finanza named none of the suspects, and its statement says they are presumed innocent until any conviction.

What an underground bank does

A normal bank moves money and keeps records. It must know its customers and report suspicious payments to the authorities. An underground bank does the same job without the records. Its best-known ancestor is hawala, in which a broker in one city takes cash, a partner in another city pays out the same sum, and the two settle up later. Value crosses the border; nothing a tax office can see does.

The Guardia di Finanza used the English words "underground banking" for what it says happened in Pero: moving money "outside official channels", around the checks banks run to catch laundering, which means passing dirty money through enough accounts and companies that it comes out looking clean. The customers, police say, were mainly drug traffickers and tax evaders.

The four steps

Police describe the scheme in four stages.

First, collecting cash. Two Chinese nationals gathered cash inside their community, most of it from tax offences, according to the Guardia di Finanza. A man of Calabrian origin allegedly delivered more than €5 million in drug money on several occasions, partly through his own "postini", or postmen. In return, these cash suppliers received the same value in cryptocurrency, or bank transfers to accounts in Asia, Canada and South America.

Second, fake invoices. The group ran a string of "cartiere", paper companies registered to front men, with fake offices mainly in Lombardy and Campania. They billed real businesses, mostly in construction, logistics and services, for work that was never done. The businesses paid by bank transfer and booked the invoices as costs, cutting the profit they paid tax on. After a while each paper company was deliberately pushed into bankruptcy and replaced by a new one.

Third, cash back. Once an invoice was paid, couriers handed the business the same amount in cash, minus a commission of between 2% and 5%. The business ended up with a tax deduction and a pile of cash nobody could trace. In effect, drug money and untaxed cash had been swapped for clean-looking bank payments sitting in the paper companies' accounts.

Fourth, sending it out. The money in the paper companies' accounts went almost entirely to bank accounts in Luxembourg, Lithuania and Germany, police say. From there it moved to crypto exchanges, platforms that work like a broker, swapping euros for digital coins, and the exchanges sent the coins to wallets controlled by the group. A crypto wallet is an account that only the holder of a secret code can move. Police described the coins only as cryptocurrency that is "difficult to trace" and named neither the coins nor the exchanges.

Why crypto? Cash is bulky and banks ask questions about it. Crypto crosses borders in minutes with no bank in the middle. Here, police say, it did two jobs: it paid the people who supplied the cash, and it was where the paper companies' money finally ended up.

The same pipe carried a second kind of dirty money. Police say the paper companies' accounts also received many transfers from people who had reported being cheated in online crypto investment scams. Their savings were laundered the same way.

The mafia in the room

Prosecutors add two aggravating factors to the conspiracy charge. The first is that it helped two mafias. Part of the profits allegedly went to support jailed members of the 'Ndrangheta, which police call a mafia "solidarity fund", and the group allegedly supplied weapons and vehicles to people close to the Società Foggiana, the crime syndicate of Foggia in Puglia that Italians call the "Fourth Mafia". The second is the "mafia method": systematic threats, mafia "protection" for the group's business in Pero, and guns and ammunition kept to guard the loads of cash and drugs.

In his order, which runs to more than 500 pages, Judge Milani calls the Pero offices an "operational base" and a meeting point for 'Ndrangheta figures, LaC News24 reported. He wrote that the bank could keep running with "always new schemes and always new companies".

The two alleged leaders' earlier convictions came from landmark cases. Infinito was the 2010 investigation that exposed the 'Ndrangheta's network in Lombardy. Aemilia, launched in January 2015 with 117 arrests, targeted clans from the Crotone area that had settled in Emilia-Romagna.

The inquiry also points inside the justice system. Police say an employee of the Milan court, helped by a lawyer, illegally searched the court's computer systems and told the group's leaders how the investigation was going. Italian newspapers report that he was a driver in the office of the preliminary investigations judges, and that a photo of the confidential register of suspects reached the group over Signal, an encrypted messaging app. He is under house arrest. A former Guardia di Finanza officer, no longer serving, is accused of taking money from a Chinese suspect in exchange for confidential information and promises of help with tax bills.

Spain, Switzerland and the man in Lugano

In Spain, the national police's central drugs and organised crime unit, UDYCO Central, was executing European arrest warrants for two suspects, the Guardia di Finanza said. Secolo d'Italia and Prima Bergamo reported both arrests. In Switzerland, the Office of the Attorney General told Corriere del Ticino that the federal police, fedpol, had carried out several house searches in the canton of Ticino on its behalf, answering a request for legal help from the Milan anti-mafia prosecutors. One person was arrested and held for extradition on the instructions of the Federal Office of Justice. Interpol's I-CAN unit, which coordinates international work against the 'Ndrangheta, supported both operations.

According to Corriere del Ticino's sources, the man arrested in Cassarate handled the conversion of the group's profits into crypto, and in Italy he is one of the 16 ordered into prison. RSI, the Swiss public broadcaster, reported that his name appears in several companies, including one in Zug, the canton nicknamed "Crypto Valley", that was once active in digital currencies and is now in liquidation. RSI said he lived officially in Switzerland from late 2022 to mid-2024 on a permit from the canton of St Gallen. The authorities have not named him.

Officers seized cash, bank accounts, crypto, cars, boats, jewellery, luxury watches and money-counting machines, the Guardia di Finanza said, without saying how much of the €21 million is crypto.