The U.S. DOJ has charged two Russians for hacking Mt. Gox, one of the first crypto exchanges, in 2011 and laundering the stolen bitcoins through BTC-e, another crypto exchange they ran from 2011 to 2017. The FBI and the U.S. Secret Service helped with the investigation. The two Russians are Alexey Bilyuchenko, 43, and Alexander Werner, 29. They allegedly broke into Mt. Gox’s server and took about 647,000 BTC from its wallets.
They then used two other online exchanges and a New York broker to hide the source of the money by sending it to offshore bank accounts they controlled. The Mt. Gox hack caused the exchange to shut down in 2014, leaving its customers with huge losses that have not been paid back yet. In another case, Bilyuchenko is also accused of working with Alexander Vinnik and others to operate BTC-e, which was used by criminals to move and store money from illegal activities.
Alexey Bilyuchenko, who now uses the surname, Ivanov, is in a Russian jail and accused of stealing more than 3.16 billion rubles worth of cryptocurrencies from WEX, the successor of BTC-e, in 2018 by blocking access to its owners and users as the system administrator. The Russian police said they have finished investigating the WEX case and have seized Bilyuchenko’s property and funds worth more than 4.3 billion rubles. He is being held in custody.
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