The 25-year-old woman, whose interim name suppression continues until a hearing on April 11, appeared for sentence before Judge John Brandts-Giesen in the Invercargill District Court yesterday.
She was sentenced to seven months’ home detention.
Health and personal details of the woman were also suppressed.
The judge said the woman, along with her co-offender, was a money mule who took $100,000 raised from drug dealing to Christchurch in a supermarket shopping bag to deliver it to two key players in the money-laundering operation.
The summary of facts said the main player of interest in the police’s “Operation Brooking” ran an informal and unregistered bitcoin trading operation in New Zealand between 2015 and 2020, providing a cryptocurrency trading service and a money remitting service. He would also use the money to buy high-value assets.
The services were used by people who had obtained money by illegal means.
The New Zealand Herald reported in October 2020, millions of dollars of high-end assets were seized in Auckland as part of the operation.
The Southland woman admitted receiving the money from an unidentified third party, then transporting the money with her co-offender on May 26, 2020, to Christchurch Airport, where it was handed to two main players in the money-laundering ring.
At 9.55pm that day, the Southland pair were arrested in Timaru.
The two men had flown from Auckland to collect it and were caught after police executed a covert search warrant on the Cook Strait ferry the following day and found the money in a rental car they were travelling in.
"Approximately $NZ100,000 cash was located inside the bag in bundles of $20 banknotes (held together with tape) and $50 banknotes (held together with rubber bands)," the summary said.
In court yesterday Judge Brandts-Giesen said nothing was known about the gains the woman and her co-offender made from the transaction, but he could not imagine why anyone would put their liberty at risk for no reward.
While the woman and her co-offender were not significant players in the scheme, without receivers there would not be thieves, he said.
Defence counsel Scott Williamson said stressors in the woman’s life had led to this offending.
“[The defendant is] one small cog in a much bigger wheel, but the wheel is a big one and I have to accept that.
"Without the small cogs, the big wheel wouldn’t work.”
