Security News > 2023 > June > Unsealed: Charges against Russians blamed for Mt Gox crypto-exchange collapse

American prosecutors have unsealed an indictment against two Russians who allegedly had a hand in the ransacking and collapse of Mt Gox a decade ago, an implosion that cost the cryptocurrency exchange's thousands of customers most of their digital coins.

Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner, 29, were charged with conspiring to launder about 647,000 Bitcoins stolen from Mt Gox starting in 2011, fueling the exchange's eventual collapse in 2014.

Over the course of three years, Bilyuchenko, Verner, and their co-conspirators stole Bitcoin from the exchange, transferring the digital coins from Mt Gox's BTC wallets to addresses controlled by Bilyuchenko and Verner, it is claimed.

They're accused of negotiating a fraudulent contract to provide advertising services to a Bitcoin brokerage service in New York City, and used that contract to hide and launder the Bitcoin they stole from Mt Gox.

In return, the brokerage service received credit on one of the exchanges, which the defendants used to launder more than 300,000 of Bitcoins from Mt Gox.

Mark Karpeles, the one-time CEO of Mt Gox, was convicted in Japan in 2019 of falsifying data about the exchange's finances but acquitted of embezzlement.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/06/12/mt_gox_crypto_indictments/