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George Cottrell, a senior adviser to Nigel Farage, served eight months in U.S. prisons for offering money laundering advice to undercover federal agents.
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Cottrell now co-authored ‘How To Launder Money’, detailing modern techniques criminals use to clean illicit funds through Spotify streams, crowdfunding platforms, and cryptocurrency.
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The book reveals that anti-money laundering laws stop only 0.05% of the global illicit economy worth 5%.
George Cottrell, the man arrested for fraud and helping undercover agents launder drug money, has now written a book with over 100 pages of advice on how criminals hide their dirty money. After spending time in federal prison, he has written this book to help people who want to learn how criminals hide their money.
Cottrell is 31 years old, has become a fundraiser for the Reform UK political party, and refers to party leader Nigel Farage as like a father to him. His latest book breaks down the different methods that criminals use to launder their money, including uploading fake photos and making fake albums on Spotify, and setting up crowdfunding campaigns to then convert that into digital currency.
From Dark Web Crimes to Bestseller Lists
In 2016, federal authorities arrested Cottrell after the Republican Convention, where Donald Trump had won his nomination for President. Cottrell faces wire fraud charges after advising undercover agents posing as drug dealers in Las Vegas. He showed them on the dark web how criminal gains could be laundered. He served eight months behind bars in Illinois and Arizona facilities.
Cottrell’s background reads like fiction. His father, Mark, attended school with Prince Andrew. His mother, Fiona Cottrell, once worked as a glamour model and had romantic links to Prince Charles during the 1970s. Fiona became Reform’s biggest donor last year, contributing £750,000 (over 100,000 USD approximately) to the party.
He went to school in a private institution on the Caribbean Island of Mustique and then he went back to his London home before returning to Montenegro, a country in the Balkans and a well-known location for laundering money. He dated Georgia Toffolo from Made In Chelsea for the duration of 2019 through 2023.
Modern Laundering Techniques Exposed
‘How To Launder Money’ explains how criminals hide income earned from drug trades, contract killings, robbery, and fraud. The book explains that inorganic music streaming contracts help wash dirty money. Criminals use cryptocurrencies to pay for streams of strategically placed songs. Then ‘clean’ money flows back as royalties.
Cottrell also highlights crowdfunding platforms as effective laundering tools. These ‘giving platforms’ raise money for causes like “medical expenses, tuition or to remove a tattoo.”
They work well because there is “little oversight on the cause,” according to the book. Art and antiquities markets also serve criminals well. But crypto mixers remain the laundering method of choice for dark web criminals, which is why the U.S. government’s seizure of $400 million from Helix sent shockwaves through the underground economy, proving that even anonymous transactions can be traced. Dealers often inflate values for works, frequently fakes, which serves as a “red flag” for laundering operations.
However, Cottrell warns against one particular scheme. “No matter how good you are or how valuable the originals might be, don’t do it,” he writes about forging works by living artists.
Cottrell makes clear that the battle against money laundering is failing. In the book, co-written with L Burke Files, an international financial investigator, he states: “Some 5 per cent of the global economy is illicit.”
He then poses a startling question: “Do you know what percentage is stopped by AML [anti-money-laundering] laws? A staggeringly low 0.05 per cent… These laws are not working and have never worked.”
This staggering failure is perhaps best illustrated by the scale of illicit finance flowing through cryptocurrency, including the $2 billion laundered via crypto exchanges from Russian dark web markets, a sum that represents just a fraction of the total dark web economy Cottrell describes.
High-Stakes Gambling and Legal Troubles
Besides his writing career, Cottrell has been involved in other activities as well; last month, billionaire Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club owner Tony Bloom told the High Court that he was part of a syndicate that had placed millions in bets via Cottrell’s gambling accounts.
According to reports from 2024, Cottrell lost £16 million while playing high-stakes poker against Chinese billionaires, movie stars, and professional poker players in Montenegro.
Cottrell says his book targets people fighting financial crime, not aiding criminals, and defends it by highlighting his research and fieldwork. The case raises serious questions about whether convicted criminals should profit from publications that teach others to commit crimes.
Law enforcement agencies now face the challenge of monitoring whether this book becomes a manual for aspiring money launderers. Cottrell’s unique position as both a convicted criminal and a political adviser adds another layer to this controversial release.
