That's very true if you want to live modestly. If that was the case, you probably wouldn't have stolen $25M. You can easily buy a cheap used car with cash.... you can pay rent on an apartment with cash...

Here's what you do....

"I'm a crypto investor. I trade quite a lot and have been quite successful in doing that. I invested $500 in LaunderCoin which went up by 8,000,000%. I trade a lot looking for the next great coin."

You don't have to spend the crypto... You just have to launder it, which is far, far easier because of how many cryptos exist.

While the physical cash has no chain of custody, when making a large purchase or depositing large amounts of cash, the bank is going to need to understand source-of-funds.

This is the hard things about cash... it's hard to spend in large amounts. You really need a bank account when spending a large amount of money.

Stuffing EUR500 notes into a cane or suitcase is not money laundering. That's just moving cash around. The difficult thing is the actual laundering part....

Let's say you steal €25,000,000 in cash from a bank and you get away with it. There are no suspects... you're free. Now you have a problem: it's easy to spend small amounts of cash, but eyes will be raised if you try and buy a car or house with cash. It's also really inconvenient to use cash for other things, like plane tickets or hotel rooms. You need to get this money into a bank, and the bank is going to run a source-of-funds investigation on your €25M. This is where laundering comes into play. The easiest way to do this is to start/buy a cash-based business, like a laundromat. No one is going to check the size or busyness of your laundromat. So you do $500 a week of real business and you deposit $10,000. Unfortunately, that's going to take you almost 50 years, so as your funds grow, you need to launder the money faster and faster.

With crypto, you can do this a LOT easier and faster. Find a crypto exchange that doesn't do AML/KYC (there are quite a few of them) and deposit this money. Many of them will be happy to take your €25M. Now, start moving your money from exchange to exchange, from currency to currency. Do a lot of trading across different cryptos and exchanges and personal wallets.

Now, you just need to identify a set of cryptos and would have provided a huge return during this period so you can "explain" how you got a great return. Now, get an account on a more reputable exchanges (with AML/KYC), and withdraw into your bank. Money laundered!