Good point about gold purity test he he!
I know a person who was mining ETH and never gave his details on any KYC exchange, he was dealing on some local market and got his FIAT funds via some app like cashapp or paypal or revolut, but the police shut down this service after about 2 years and froze their assets in bank accounts.
about 75K euros.

PAMP VERISCAN is pretty safe tho.

Also you don't have to physically carry around / move the gold if you know what you are doing.
1 OZ bars are pretty small also, nice price per weight ratio.
However unless your assets values for less than 100 000 euros /usd, it is not worth it to pay rent for a safe.

I am interested in the Russian article, as i know Russian very well.

Thanks for the discussion.
This is not a 1 man operation, it is an organized crime ring.
I asked some security folks and they told me FBI won't care, unless the crypto-theft is for more than 100K. (ic3.gov)
Same goes for Europol. I have alerted all CSIRT and CIRT teams about this, FBI and NSA were also informed.

However 10 mil puts a big target on the scammer's forehead and a lot of agencies will be monitoring for them.
maybe even rouge agents on local p2p markets could turn up for such sums.