The FSB detained Marat Tambiev, head of the Investigative Committee for the Tverskoy District of Moscow, on charges of taking a bribe of 10 million rubles. A couple of months later, it turned out that the suspect had saved 1032 BTC for his old age.

Law enforcement agencies gained access to the detainee’s laptop. There was a folder called “Pension”, which contained a photograph of a paper sheet with codes for accessing two cryptocurrency wallets. One of them held 932.1 bitcoins, while the other held 100 bitcoins.

The investigation believes that the head of the TFR department received cryptocurrency from members of the Infraud Organization hacker group Mark and Konstantin Bergmanov and Kirill Samokutyaevsky. The criminal case against all three was pending by Tambiev and, according to investigators, he received bitcoins last April in exchange for not seizing Infraud’s assets:

“However, during the investigation of the criminal case initiated against Mr. Tambiev under Part 6 of Art. 290 of the Criminal Code (taking a bribe on an especially large scale), it was established that the defendant is the owner of 1032.1 bitcoins, the value of which as of January 30, 2023 is equivalent to $ 23,980,843, or 1.662 billion rubles at the then exchange rate of the Central Bank.

A bribe of 1.6 billion rubles is considered a record for law enforcement officers of the Russian Federation. Deputy Prosecutor General Anatoly Razinkin filed a lawsuit in court requesting the confiscation of bitcoins for state revenue.

The hackers themselves from Infraud will not be punished for taking a bribe. For trading in credit card data, they received suspended sentences and have already handed over bitcoins in the amount of about 700 million rubles to the treasury.

In early June, it was reported that a criminal case was opened against the bankruptcy trustee from Tatarstan, Emil Khalimov, for extorting a bribe, part of which he received in cryptocurrencies.