A citizen of Russia and Portugal Alexei Andryunin, who founded the company Gotbit, was sentenced by the Boston federal court to eight months in prison. The court took into account that the businessman had already left this period in preliminary imprisonment, and Andryunin was released from custody in the courtroom, transferring law enforcement agencies from the United States under the supervision of law enforcement agencies.

According to the American Ministry of Justice, from 2018 to 2024, Gotbit carried out fictitious transactions for the sake of artificial increase in trading volumes of memcoirs and low -liquid tokens, including Saitama and Robo Inu projects. The company tried to attract the attention of investors to “pseudo -editing assets” for the sake of “including them in the listing of large cryptocurrency sites”, the Ministry of Justice insists.

“The Gotbit case is a classic example of PUMP and DUMP, only using innovative technologies. We revealed and suppressed the spread of the scheme that undermined the trust in the digital assets market, ”said the acting US prosecutor Joshua Levy.

Earlier, Andryunin concluded a deal with justice and pleaded guilty to manipulating digital assets market prices. As part of the deal with the American authorities, Andryunin agreed to confiscate digital assets with a volume of about $ 23 million, including $ 18.7 million in USDT stabilcoins and $ 4.2 million in USDC stablecoins. However, these funds, as indicated in court documents, do not cover fines and compensation for damage to investors.

The court forbade Andryunin to participate in any cryptocurrency projects for a period of three years. GOTBIT must stop its activities for the next three years.

The Gotbit case was the first criminal prosecution of the organizers of such fictitious trading in the cryptocurrency market in the United States.