A 42-year-old Belarusian and Cypriot nationwide with alleged connections to the now-defunct cryptocurrency trade BTC-e is going through costs associated to cash laundering and working an unlicensed cash providers 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 trade is alleged to have obtained deposits valued at over $4 billion, with Vinnik laundering funds obtained from the hack of one other digital trade, Mt. Gox, by means of varied on-line exchanges, together with BTC-e.
Court docket paperwork allege that the trade was a “important 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 legal exercise.
This included hacking incidents, ransomware scams, id theft schemes, and narcotics distribution rings.
“BTC-e’s servers, maintained in the USA, had been allegedly one of many major methods through which BTC-e and its operators effectuated their scheme,” the U.S. Division of Justice (DoJ) mentioned.
These servers had been leased to and maintained by Klimenka and Smooth-FX, a expertise providers firm managed by the defendant.
BTC-e has additionally been accused of failing to ascertain 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 – had 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 id theft for offenses that led to the theft of $800,000 from at the least 5 totally different victims between August 2022 and March 2023.
City, who glided by the aliases Sosa, Elijah, King Bob, Anthony Ramirez, and Gustavo Fring, is claimed to be a key member of the cybercrime group often known as Scattered Spider, in accordance with KrebsOnSecurity, in addition to a “high member” of a broader cybercrime ecosystem that calls itself The Com.
It additionally follows the Justice Division’s announcement of costs towards three people, Robert Powell, Carter Rohn, and Emily Hernandez, in relation to a SIM swapping assault geared toward crypto trade 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 working 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 bunch of thousands and thousands of {dollars} from victims’ accounts.
Blockchain analytics agency Elliptic, in October 2023, mentioned the plunder belongings had been laundered by means of cross-chain crime in collaboration with Russia-nexus intermediaries in an try and obscure the path.
