It was all over the news yesterday in Spain, with images of crypto-ATMs being confiscated by the police force, wheeled out of a store that sold IT equipment. The two ATMs that were decommissioned where the stars, leaving the eight detained members of the crime gang in as secondary actors in the show.

Europol worked alongside Spanish Guardia Civil for months to uncover the money laundering scheme, which seemed to be provided as a service to other criminal groups. The estimate is of around 100K Euros being washed each day. In went the cash into the ATM, switched to BTC, and back to FIAT in Colombia. The ATMs were as legal as you can get now, belonging to a sort of franquise. It appears they used a bunch of fake ID cards to perform the operations, making sure no single TX was over the radar limit.

The police also decommissioned a bunch of crypto wallets, whose TXs add up to an equivalent of 9M Euros in a three month period. Pretty over the top it they wanted to stay under the radar.

Not the ideal news for BTC ATMs. These two ATMs now have the arguable honour of being the first ATMs to be detained in Europe (so as to say …).

See Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f628fNzFkk