Feature $ 8 billion in bitcoins: which Russian was replaced by American Fagel
Oleksandr Vinnik, a 38-year-old Russian, suspected of organizing money laundering operations using bitcoins, managed BTC-E, once one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. He was arrested in 2017 in a small coastal village in northern Greece and was detained at the request of Washington on suspicion of laundering $ 4 billion through the exchange. US authorities also associated it with mt collapse. GOX, Japanese bitcoin-turning, which fell in 2014 after breaking.
Vinnik received money from Mt's hacking. Gox and washed them through BTC-E and Tradehill, another exchange in San Francisco, which he possessed, was discussed in the statement of the Ministry of Justice at that time. Initially, Vinnik was extracted to France and then to the United States, where in May 2024 he found himself guilty of plotting for money. He was threatened with up to 20 years in prison.
He was to be sentenced in January, but in November, the US Federal Judge agreed to postpone the adoption of the sentence by June, having issued a short decision that did not specify the reason for the delay, as evidenced by the court records. The US Prosecutor's Office, the Northern District of California, said: BTC-E has worked over $ 9 billion in 2011 to 2017, when it was closed after Vinnik's arrest.
She served more than a million users, many of whom were in the United States, "BTC-E was one of the main ways in which cybercriminals worldwide have been transferred, laundered and maintained criminal income from their illegal activity," the prosecutor's office said last year.
The US prosecutors also noted that the exchange had received criminal profits from numerous hacker attacks, attacks using programs, schemes of theft of personal data, corrupt civil servants and drug dealers, and Vinnik managed it "with intention to promote this illegal activity. " According to the court, on Tuesday, US District Judge Susan Ilston appointed an afternoon meeting in Vinnik, without revealing the details of what was discussed at the hearing.
The journalist Andriy Zakharov, who wrote a book about Vinnik, said that, according to the available data, the Russian controlled 80,000 bitcoins stolen from Mt. The 2011 Gox, which aroused Moscow's strong interest in returning it. "80,000 bitcoins. 8 billion dollars. 2% of federal budget revenues for 2025. Welcome home!" He ironically wrote in Telegram. We will remind, Mark Fogel, who returned to the United States, was detained at Moscow Airport in 2021.