Russian police have taken six other members and executives into custody in connection with the notorious cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme Finiko. As part of an ongoing investigation into pyramids that defrauded investors all over the globe, police in Russia and the Republic of Tatarstan conducted numerous searches.
Russian Federation Arrests Finiko Case
The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, with the help of the National Guard of the Russian Federation, has taken into custody six participants and leaders of Finiko, Russia’s largest financial pyramid in recent decades. The members of the fraudulent scheme have been active between January 2018 and July 2021 in Tatarstan and other Russian regions, the ministry’s spokesperson Irina Volk told Tass.
Volk stated that the fraudsters advertised the project in order to get investors. They promised high profit rates of between 3 and 5% per day. These fraudsters demanded that they convert their fiat currency into bitcoin to send to Finiko’s cryptocurrency wallets. Their personal accounts were then credited with “Tsifron,” the platform’s own currency.
Finiko did not register as a Russian legal entity, and it didn’t make investments for clients. Finiko stopped paying promised dividends after a while and investors were not able to withdraw funds. More than 5,000 complaints are part of the evidence in the criminal case.
The official loss figure is 5 billion rubles, or $65.9 million. However, the true amount could be higher. Chainalysis reports that between August 2021 and December 2019, the scammers had received bitcoin worth over $1.5billion in separate deposits of 800,000. People from Russia, Ukraine and many other former Soviet republics were among those who fell prey to the scam.
A number of Finiko’s top figures were arrested last year, including the pyramid’s founder and mastermind Kirill Doronin, two of its vice presidents, Ilgiz Shakirov and Dina Gabdullina, as well as Lilia Nurieva, who rose to the rank of a so-called “10th Star.” In November, Doronin offered to testify against 44 of his accomplices. Zygmunt Zygmuntovich and Marat Sabirov were his close friends. They escaped detention last summer after the crypto scheme crashed.
Irina Volk pointed out that the confiscation of property belonging to the suspects totalling more than 1.3 million rubles was a result. Representatives of the Russian interior ministry’s Investigative Department have carried out over 70 searches alongside the latest arrests, seizing documents and computer equipment as evidence for the case.
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