The United States federal government has actually charged 2 Russian nationals in connection with the series of hacks that lowered the Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange in 2014. In a news release on Friday, the Department of Justice states it charged Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner with conspiring to wash 647,000 Bitcoins taken from the exchange, which deserved around $400 million at the time.
The federal government is individually charging Bilyuchenko for dealing with Alexander Vinnik– who the DOJ prosecuted in 2017— for running BTC-e, a now-defunct crypto exchange that worked as “among the main methods by which cyber bad guys all over the world moved, washed, and saved the criminal profits of their prohibited activities.”
At the time of Vinnik’s indictment, the federal government declared that taken funds from Mt. Gox went through BTC-e and wallets connected with Vinnik. Now the DOJ declares that Bilyuchenko, Verner, and other co-conspirators washed over 300,000 Bitcoins that had actually been taken from Mt. Gox too.
” As declared in the indictments, beginning in 2011, Bilyuchenko and Verner took a huge quantity of cryptocurrency from Mt. Gox, adding to the exchange’s supreme insolvency,” Assistant Chief Law Officer Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. states in a declaration. “Equipped with the ill-gotten gains from Mt. Gox, Bilyuchenko presumably went on to assist establish the well-known BTC-e virtual currency exchange, which washed funds for cyber bad guys worldwide.”
While Bilyuchenko deals with charges with conspiracy to devote cash laundering and running an unlicensed cash services company and over twenty years behind bars, Verner is charged with conspiracy to devote cash laundering with an optimum charge of twenty years in jail.