Abstract:

Earnings resulting from committing crimes are usually generated in cash, which is the form that illegal funds take, generally, in the preliminary stages of money laundering. Since cash is still widely used in the criminal economy and remains the raw material of most criminal activity, a legitimate question arises: can the elimination or limitation of cash reduce the phenomenon of money laundering? Through this paper, we aimed to identify and propose cash substitutes as means of reducing financial crime.  We showed that replacing cash with a virtual currency (crypto and CBDC) could be a viable solution for fighting crime.  This is the first stage of our endeavour to find answers to a debatable and topical issue - a "cashless" society -  from the economics of crime point of view.