2023-06-09 16:16:10
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has indicted two Russian nationals for stealing 647,000 bitcoins from the Mt. Gox crypto exchange that went bankrupt years ago and then using that money to run their own illegal crypto exchange.
A according to court documents Alexey Bilyuchenko, 43, and Aleksandr Verner, 29, both Russian nationals, were charged with conspiring to launder some 647,000 bitcoins from the Mt. Gox hack.
“This announcement marks an important milestone in two major investigations into cryptocurrency. Beginning in 2011, Bilyuchenko and Verner stole massive amounts of cryptocurrency from Mt. Gox, contributing to the exchange’s eventual bankruptcy, according to the indictment. Armed with ill-gotten gains from Mt. Gox, Bilyuchenko allegedly helped create the infamous BTC-e virtual currency exchange, which laundered money for cybercriminals worldwide.” said Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division.
According to court documents released in the Southern District of New York (SDNY), in September 2011, Bilyuchenko, Verner and their accomplices allegedly gained unauthorized access to the server hosting Mt. Gox’s crypto wallets. At the time, Mt. Gox was the largest existing bitcoin exchange in the crypto space, serving thousands of users worldwide. Mt. Gox stored crypto wallets containing customers’ bitcoins and the private keys used to authorize bitcoin transfers from those wallets on a computer server located in Japan.
The two Russians used the access to transfer bitcoin from Mt. Gox wallets to their own addresses. From September 2011 to at least May 2014, Bilyuchenko and Verner stole approximately 647,000 bitcoins, which would be roughly $17 billion today.
Court documents state that Bilyuchenko, along with Vinnik and others, allegedly operated the BTC-e exchange from crypto stolen from Mt. Gox from 2011 until it was shut down by law enforcement in July 2017. BTC-e has served more than one million users worldwide, processed billions of dollars worth of transactions, a large part of which was linked to some crime.
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