The US Department of Justice has charged two Russian citizens with hacking into the Mt.Gox cryptocurrency exchange and laundering 647,000 bitcoins.
The agency said in a statement that Alexey Bilyuchenko, 43, and Alexander Werner, 29, were charged with conspiracy to launder bitcoin in the Mt.Gox hack, which collapsed in 2014 after losing half a billion dollars of crypto assets.
“For years, Bilyuchenko and his associates allegedly ran a digital currency exchange that allowed billions of dollars of money to be laundered by criminals around the world, including computer hackers, ransomware creators, drug gangs and corrupt government officials,” prosecutor Ismail Ramsey said (Ismail Ramsey).
Bilyuchenko is also accused of conspiring with Alexander Vinnik to manage the BTC-e crypto exchange from 2011 to 2017.
Vinnik is now under arrest in the US on charges of laundering up to $9 billion through BTC-e. Recently it became known that Vinnik is trying to get him included in any option for a prisoner exchange between Moscow and Washington.
Mt.Gox was once the world’s largest trading platform for bitcoin, accounting for about 90% of the total trading volume of the first cryptocurrency. In April 2014, the exchange filed for liquidation due to the loss of 850,000 BTC due to a hacker attack. The bankruptcy proceedings are still ongoing. Only recently, the crypto exchange began paying out to its customers.
Source: Bits
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