Russian Operator of BTC-e Crypto Exchange Pleads Guilty to Money Laundering

A Russian operator of a now-dismantled BTC-e cryptocurrency exchange has pleaded guilty to money laundering prices from 2011 to 2017.

Alexander Vinnik, 44, was charged in January 2017 and taken into custody in Greece in July 2017. He was subsequently extradited to the U.S. in August 2022. Vinnik and his co-conspirators have been accused of proudly owning and controlling BTC-e, which permitted its felony shoppers to trade in Bitcoin with high stages of anonymity.

BTC-e is said to have facilitated transactions for cybercriminals around the world, getting illicit proceeds from several laptop intrusions and hacking incidents, ransomware scams, identification theft strategies, corrupt general public officials, and narcotics distribution rings.

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The crypto trade obtained additional than $4 billion value of bitcoin in excess of the training course of its procedure, in accordance to the U.S. Section of Justice (DoJ). It also processed about $9 billion-truly worth of transactions and served above one million people around the world, quite a few of them in the U.S.

In addition, the entity was not registered as a cash providers organization with the U.S. Office of Treasury irrespective of doing sizeable business enterprise in the U.S. and did not implement any anti-revenue laundering (AML) or Know Your Consumer (KYC) pointers as needed by federal regulation, building it an eye-catching selection for criminals searching to obscure their unwell-gotten money.

Vinnik was previously billed with 1 depend of procedure of an unlicensed income support business enterprise, just one depend of conspiracy to dedicate dollars laundering, 17 counts of income laundering, and two counts of participating in unlawful monetary transactions.

“BTC-e was a single of the major approaches by which cyber criminals all around the globe transferred, laundered, and stored the criminal proceeds of their unlawful things to do,” the DoJ said. “Vinnik operated BTC-e with the intent to endorse these unlawful activities and was liable for a loss amount of at least $121 million.”

Earlier this February, the U.S. governing administration charged a further BTC-e operator, a Belarusian and Cypriot national named Aliaksandr Klimenka for revenue laundering and working an unlicensed revenue products and services small business.

Soon subsequent Vinnik’s arrest in 2017, the U.S. Office of the Treasury’s Fiscal Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) declared [PDF] it assessed a $110 million civil funds penalty from BTC-e for violating AML rules and an extra $12 million penalty versus Vinnik.

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