The former head of the closed cryptocurrency exchange WEX (formerly BTC-e) Dmitry Vasilyev was detained on May 25 at the airport of Croatia at the request of the Kazakh authorities in connection with the theft of $20,000 from an investor.
A native of the Republic of Belarus, Dmitry Vasiliev, the former CEO of the already defunct WEX exchange, was detained at the Franjo Tudjman Airport in Zagreb. The city police acted on the basis of a warrant issued by Interpol at the request of law enforcement agencies in Kazakhstan, who are looking for Vasilyev for stealing money from an investor in the amount of $20,000.
The crime with which the entrepreneur is accused seems relatively minor compared to other charges against him. The WEX marketplace closed in 2018 due to bankruptcy, resulting in a total user loss of at least $400 million.
In August last year, Vasilyev was detained at the Warsaw airport in connection with the same appeal to the police by a former WEX client about the loss of $20,000. However, a Polish court prohibited Vasilyev’s extradition to Kazakhstan, and in December, after his release, the businessman returned to Russia. In 2019, Vasiliev was arrested in Italy, but local authorities released him after a few weeks, citing errors in the extradition request. Then Vasiliev managed to return to St. Petersburg.
In March 2022, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs announced the arrest of an employee of an unknown trading platform on charges of stealing crypto assets. There is an assumption that it could be Alexey Bilyuchenko, another co-founder of WEX.
The WEX exchange was created in 2019 as a “successor” to the infamous BTC-e exchange, which closed at the beginning of the same year after the arrest of Russian Alexander Vinnik in Greece. The US Attorney’s Office accuses him of laundering up to $9 billion through BTC-e. In December 2020, a Parisian court sentenced Vinnik to five years in prison and a €100,000 fine.
Source: Bits
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