Money laundering: how algorithms and high-tech finance hide EUR 40 billion
Eurispes study on the link between evasion and money laundering: over 100,000 infiltrated companies, offshore financial flows and high-frequency finance. A snapshot of an increasingly global system where organised crime integrates illicit capital into the legal economy
by Nino Amadore
Key points
Follow the algorithm. You will find the money. Follow the algorithm, you will find the money. It is the natural evolution of that 'follow the money' that Giovanni Falcone had turned into an investigative method. Falcone was among the first magistrates in Italia to use technological tools and systematic financial analysis in anti-mafia investigations. He understood that organised crime is not only fought on the ground, but by reconstructing the flow of money. Today, money no longer just moves between current accounts or across borders. It moves within digital platforms, payment circuits, crypto-assets, high-frequency transactions. If in the 1980s you had to follow the transfer, today you have to follow the code that executes it. This is explained in the study "The complex relationship between money laundering and tax evasion" carried out as part of the work of the Laboratory on Fiscal Policies, in which Eurispes analyses the structural welding between evasion and money laundering, emphasising how the contrast can only take place in an international dimension.
Fertile ground for organised crime
Criminal organisations are the main actors in this phenomenon. Money laundering is the indispensable step that allows the proceeds of illegal activities to be integrated into the legal economy, concealing their origin and ensuring reinvestment. Legal enterprises become essential vehicles in the 'washing' process: they often take the form of 'paper mills' or 'zombie enterprises', with no real productive structure, minimal fixed assets, derisory staff costs, inflated turnovers and sudden bankruptcies before the intervention of the tax authorities. Infiltration also involves the gradual replacement of bank financing with internal criminal resources to reduce the risk of suspicious transaction reports.
Over 100,000 companies infiltrated
Between 2001 and 2020, more than 100,000 Italian companies - more than 2% of the total - have been infiltrated. It is not just a question of companies directly linked to mafias: illicit capital is integrated into the market. Money laundering is no longer just concealment of profit. It is the injection of capital into the real economy. And when opaque capital enters the production system, it distorts competition: off-market prices, artificial losses, distortion of public tenders.
The financial burden
Money laundering accounts for an estimated 1.5 to 2% of GDP. Laundering volumes amount to 62-70% of the total value of transactions reported as suspicious. The Financial Intelligence Unit, with about 150-160 staff members, receives almost 150,000 reports per year. In the first half of 2025, SOS reached 80,930, an increase of 15.6% compared to the previous year. Innovative sectors are growing: gaming operators, payment services, crypto-related platforms. A significant share of the reports concerns tax matters. Evasion is one of the main sources of money laundering.
From tax savings to reinvestment
The mechanism is straightforward: illicit tax savings generate liquidity; if that liquidity is reinvested in such a way as to obstruct its identification, one enters the perimeter of money laundering or selflaundering. VAT fraud, false invoicing, omitted payments produce flows that re-enter the legal economy. The result is a structural welding between tax evasion and money laundering.
