A 42-year-old Belarusian and Cypriot nationwide with alleged connections to the now-defunct cryptocurrency alternate BTC-e is going through costs associated to cash laundering and working an unlicensed cash companies enterprise.
Aliaksandr Klimenka, who was arrested in Latvia on December 21, 2023, was extradited to the U.S. If convicted, he faces a most penalty of 25 years in jail.
BTC-e, which had been working since 2011, was seized by regulation enforcement authorities in late July 2017 following the arrest of one other key member Alexander Vinnik, in Greece.
The alternate is alleged to have acquired deposits valued at over $4 billion, with Vinnik laundering funds acquired from the hack of one other digital alternate, Mt. Gox, by way of varied on-line exchanges, together with BTC-e.
Courtroom paperwork allege that the alternate was a “vital cybercrime and on-line cash laundering entity,” permitting its customers to commerce in bitcoin with excessive ranges of anonymity, thereby constructing a buyer base that engaged in felony exercise.
This included hacking incidents, ransomware scams, identification theft schemes, and narcotics distribution rings.
“BTC-e’s servers, maintained in the USA, have been allegedly one of many main methods through which BTC-e and its operators effectuated their scheme,” the U.S. Division of Justice (DoJ) mentioned.
These servers have been leased to and maintained by Klimenka and Delicate-FX, a expertise companies firm managed by the defendant.
BTC-e has additionally been accused of failing to determine an anti-money laundering course of or know-your-customer (KYC) verification in accordance with U.S. federal legal guidelines.
In June 2023, two Russian nationals – Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner – have been charged for his or her roles in masterminding the 2014 digital heist of Mt. Gox.
Information of Klimenka’s indictment comes because the DoJ charged Noah Michael City, 19, of Palm Coast, Florida, with wire fraud and aggravated identification theft for offenses that led to the theft of $800,000 from no less than 5 completely different victims between August 2022 and March 2023.
City, who glided by the aliases Sosa, Elijah, King Bob, Anthony Ramirez, and Gustavo Fring, is alleged to be a key member of the cybercrime group referred to as Scattered Spider, in line with KrebsOnSecurity, in addition to a “prime member” of a broader cybercrime ecosystem that calls itself The Com.
It additionally follows the Justice Division’s announcement of costs in opposition to three people, Robert Powell, Carter Rohn, and Emily Hernandez, in relation to a SIM swapping assault aimed toward crypto alternate FTX to steal greater than $400 million on the time of its collapse in 2022.
Powell (aka R, R$, and ElSwapo1), Rohn (aka Carti and Punslayer), and Hernandez (aka Em) are accused of operating an enormous cybercriminal theft ring dubbed the Powell SIM Swapping Crew that orchestrated SIM swapping assaults between March 2021 and April 2023 and stole a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} from victims’ accounts.
Blockchain analytics agency Elliptic, in October 2023, mentioned the plunder belongings had been laundered by way of cross-chain crime in collaboration with Russia-nexus intermediaries in an try to obscure the path.
