The trail that led to the enormous and complicated network was spotted during the 2021 pandemic lockdown, as drugs gangs across Europe struggled to move piles of cash from street sales into the legitimate economy.
That, in turn, made it harder for them to buy in more produce, such as cocaine from South America.
The NCA says two cryptocurrency networks based in Moscow, known as Smart and TGR, offered a solution.
Both were sitting on large piles of cryptocurrency from ransomware attacks. That’s a form of online extortion in which a gang paralyses an organisation’s computer systems until it pays a fee to regain control.
TGR and Smart took the profits from those attacks and struck a deal with British drugs networks, giving them an almost instantaneous way of converting dirty street money into a useable asset.
