An autumn morning two years ago, the rain hangs in the air over a residential area south of Stockholm. Armed police officers from the National Task Force have made their way to a white stone villa.
When the clock strikes eleven, the police get the go-ahead, rush into the lot ready to arrest a 39-year-old man from Russia. He is suspected of being the leader of a large money laundering network.
The police discover the man in the yard in front of his house, together with two other suspicious men. The 39-year-old sees the officers and reacts with lightning speed, running away across the lawn while trying to delete the Telegram messaging app from his phone. A policeman catches up to the man, wrestles him down and takes the phone while the app is still open.
In the villa, the police then find luxury bags, expensive watches and banknotes hidden in drawers and among clothes.
At the same time, a total of eight Russian-speaking people were arrested in Stockholm and in Riga in Latvia.
Prosecutors at the Environmental Crime Agency suspect that the network has laundered half a billion kroner for Swedish companies in the construction industry.
There the work begins with mapping in detail how the league has worked.
Eugen Alm, one of the prosecutors in the case, remembers how it all started. The investigators had come across chats in which an address to an apartment south of Stockholm was mentioned. The apartment seemed to function as a kind of office.
- There would be cash there, he says.
Visitors flocked to the apartment in the yellow apartment building in a Stockholm suburb. Prosecutors decided on surveillance and wiretapping and set up a camera in a nearby apartment.
Through secret data reading, they also managed to get into one of the phones used in the office.
- A technically gifted employee managed to get a trojan into the phone. We don't always succeed in such things, so when we did, we were very happy. It was a gold mine, says Eugen Alm.
Now the investigators could follow in real time everything that happened on the phone and see how messages in encrypted apps were sent.
A pattern quickly emerged. The apartment had become a center for money laundering on a large scale, where construction contractors turned to get cash for black wages.
A group of female employees in the office explained to the builders how the money would be laundered for a fee of up to 15 percent of the amount. The entrepreneurs chatted with the fictitious user Sara Larsson on the intercepted phone. She provided detailed instructions on how cash could be released using invoicing from the scam companies the network had set up.
The construction managers transferred money that the network laundered, including through car sales, crypto trading and transactions to Ukraine, which the 39-year-old manager controlled.
The result: millions of kroner in banknotes that the network hid in wardrobes and pull-out drawers in the office.
The "office staff" took care of the administration and threw a key through the window when the construction companies were to collect their money. About twenty people came daily for short visits to the premises to collect cash which they could then give to their black workers.
- The customers were told when there was money to collect, says Eugen Alm.
The millions flowed into the network, which investigators have now begun to call the Money Laundering Factory. Sara Larsson even had to slow down the inflow of money from the construction companies to reduce the risk of discovery. In intercepted conversations between employees it is stated:
"I have payments for two million, shall we not make a stop?"
"As far as the payments are concerned, you should take it easy, little by little, slowly."
The money laundering factory grew in size and eventually operated as a business. In the internal chats, great dissatisfaction was visible when the 39-year-old manager denied his "employees" holidays and demanded overtime.
"Tell me, please, what are my working hours? Everyone writes to me around the clock and says it's urgent, damn it," writes a woman in the office to the 39-year-old.
The leader seemed to rule the business with an iron fist, including via the app Telegram with his alias Dictator.
Thanks to the chats and the wiretapping, the investigators got closer and closer to the Money Laundering Factory. But mapping out which people were driving the scheme was difficult. One day, help came from an unexpected place: an email to the Ecocrime Authority with insider information.
- We still do not know who sent the email. But it was quite specific, with named individuals confirming the scheme. The email also gave us new directions to work towards, says Eugen Alm.
An important part of the Money Laundering Factory's operations was to start scam companies that could invoice the construction companies. Back then, goalkeepers were needed, people who are often in a vulnerable situation and can act as representatives for a fee.
A 37-year-old woman in Riga in Latvia acted as the spider in the web under the 39-year-old's leadership. Her task was to find goalkeepers in Latvia who could consider becoming board members in the network's Swedish money laundering company.
After she recruited goalkeepers, she booked flight or ferry trips to Stockholm for them. In Sweden, the goalkeepers were taken to the Tax Agency and various bank offices to obtain Swedish ID cards, open bank accounts and activate bank IDs. The 39-year-old manager and others in the network were then able to remotely control the goalkeepers using their bank IDs and carry out transactions and approve invoices in the goalkeepers' names. The plan was to get away from crime and let the bouncers get caught.
But in the end, the Ecocrime Authority was able to find decisive evidence against the Money Laundering Factory. The crackdown on that gray autumn morning two years ago led to the 39-year-old manager, the goalkeeper broker in Riga and three other people being sentenced to long prison terms. The prosecutors were finally able to prove that their crime had promoted money laundering of SEK 385 million.
The target is the Ecocrime Authority's biggest ever, but it is actually about much bigger money. People who have worked for the network have later been charged in separate cases.
As recently as October this year, a man was charged with having laundered over two million kroner through false invoices with connections to the Money Laundering Factory.
- This goal is a gift that just keeps on giving, says Eugen Alm.
